How to mark myself as the opposite of a LinkedIn LION to discourage invitations from them?

Question

I don't want to receive invitations from LinkedIn LIONs:

A LION is defined as a LinkedIn Open Networker. Basically a LION is someone who will accept a connection request from everyone and anyone who sends them one.

LinkedIn LIONs like to mark themselves with their "LION" status:

LIONs are easy to identify, as they will often display this in their profile in a number of places including their name field, headline and summary section.

I'm assuming they do this to attract invitations from eachother. Is there a comparable label I can use to mark myself as the opposite, to repel invitations from LIONs? ("The opposite" meaning I don't want to hear from you unless you're interested in working together soon, or we've worked together in the past.)

Answer 1

I don't want to receive invitations from LinkedIn LIONs.

Well, I don't think you can stop people from sending invitations to you on LinkedIn.

However, what you can do is don't accept such invitations.

LinkedIn provides the option to reply to people even though you are not connected with them, without having to accept the invitation. That way you may probe for their real intentions before deciding to accept.

Answer 2

I don't want to receive invitations from LinkedIn LIONs.

There are a number of approaches to achieve this:

1. Prevent receiving invitations from anyone

Since LinkedIn doesn't provide any way to distinguish Lions from other animals non-Lions, err on the side of safety and assume that everyone is a Lion. You can do the following:

1. Me → Settings & Privacy → Privacy → Sync contacts → (change) → Contacts → (remove all)

2. Me → Settings & Privacy → Communications → Preferences → Who can send you invitations → Only people who appear in your “Imported Contacts” list

   Step 1 cleans up all your "imported contacts" while Step 2 allows invitations only from people in your "imported contacts", which is now empty.

2. Suggest an improvement

Help Center → LinkedIn Help Forum → Contact us → Suggest an improvement

Describe your problem there and politely request them for the following features:

• Allow users to be marked as Lions, either by themselves or using a mechanism similar to "endorsements" (For example, 42 users have endorsed John Doe as a Lion).
• Additional option in Step 2 above: "Only non-Lions".

Is there a comparable way I can mark myself as the opposite?

As stated above, Linked doesn't (presently) distinguish Lions from non-Lions. However, after they implement the improvement suggested above in approach 2, it should be fairly straightforward to mark yourself a non-Lion.

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Note: The information described above is accurate as of 10 August 2018, and may become outdated in future.