Why I don't accept connect/friendship requests from recruiters

Photo by Andrea Piacquadio: https://www.pexels.com/photo/cheerful-young-woman-screaming-into-megaphone-3761509/

When you work in IT you are in the privileged situation that people are actively offering you positions. If I wanted, I wouldn't have needed to search for a single one of my jobs. I got plenty of offerings on Xing or LinkedIn, via email or sometimes even through Twitter direct messages or Google Hangouts.

So, as the question just recently arised from a recruiter on Xing: "Why didn't I accept the request to become connected?"
Well, short answer: My starting page feed and too much clutter.

In fact, I did tend to accept those requests years ago. Quickly, this had a rather unpleasant side-effect: My feed was full of job advertisements for various positions in far too many industries. Jobs which were absolutely not relevant for me. For which I did have no skills, no training, no interest, no passion. And.. 99,9% of the time I'm not searching for a job. So why should I be forced to read job ad after job ad and - sorry for the wording - waste my time with it? Especially when it is not a one-time occurrence but a constant stream of non-interesting content.

Additionally, because of all that clutter, I sometimes didn't notice crucial personal updates from old colleagues & friends. As sadly nowadays it's the standard to just have one single feed where all postings show up. Not sorted into categories or whatever. Therefore I am more or less forced to read every article (and advertisement...) even if I'm not interested in it. Feel free to read my post The problem with social networks - and why I still miss Google+ if you want to know more.

Thais is the sole reason why I stopped doing that.
It is really nothing personal. It's just that 99,9% of the time your content is irrelevant to me - as I'm simply not on the lookout for a new challenge. And on top of that: In the short time frames when it is relevant to me, 99% of the content is - again - irrelevant to me - because the jobs don't fit what I'm searching for.

I like my feed/stream to be about stuff I'm interesting in. I don't like it when I constantly have to read stuff which is neither interesting nor relevant for me.

If, for example, LinkedIn changes the way their feed works, then my position could change. But until things stay as they are I sadly have to be a bit more rigid in who I accept as a contact.