Actually Nicole, I do that too. I do it mostly because I want to see who they are and if I think there's anything I can offer of value to them. I also look at their website to learn who they are, what they do, how they do it. Then, I would normally "accept" the invitation to connect and offer to set up a 15 minute phone call or Zoom call to exchange intro's and ideas without a sales pitch. But with the NEW super charged networking they rolled out, I started getting "invitations" to connect which I assumed were them requesting to connect with me (my bad I guess, but now I don't accept "invitations" anymore, not because there's anything wrong with the people who send the invites, but because I don't like the systemic "trickery", to me it seems deceptive. Maybe it's just me, call me old fashioned or maybe I just need to adapt to the new and forget how the old way worked.