Make LinkedIn Great Again
Intro
LinkedIn used to be great*. You could jump on there, connect with people, share your employment status and look for new opportunities.
Everything was fine. It was almost perfect. LinkedIn was ‘Facebook, but for business’.
A business social network. Lovely stuff.
Then something happened. LinkedIn got big, successful and rich, then like most rich celebrities, got addicted to drugs and went to shit.
Im 2016 I wrote a cautionary call to arms, yet nobody cared.
Then I reached out with another sooth to say about the death of social media but did anyone listen? Heck no and why should they?
Now, in 2024, LinkedIn is dreadful, it’s ‘Business Casual Facebook’
It’s the only place on the internet where you can still be living with your parents and also be a Founder/CEO.
It’s identity fraud, mixed with narcissism and oversharing. It’s Instagram with a suit on.
Job seeking
If you are lucky enough to be in gainful employment, the best thing you can do for the ‘open for work’ people, is to stop posting garbage on LinkedIn. It’s not Facebook 2.0. Real decent people have to use it daily to find work and connections.
Imagine being unemployed, struggling to make ends meet, and having to use LinkedIn EVERY DAY, as it’s the de facto channel for work/business, and, as with single people on dating apps, you have no choice but to have to use a digital product, the downside of which is that you have to digitally interact with the worst types of people.
Half of the people on here are narcissistic psychopaths. Yes, Helen in accounts, Jim from IT, that recruiter who thinks you are a ‘rockstar’.
Anyone who does a podcast, no you are not on TV, you are not a presenter, you are not a broadcasting professional. You are creating content that 99% of the time, only satiates your own need to create content to attract attention. Any why the long form? As our attention spans shorten, this particular channel of content becomes longer. 3hrs? We don’t need to know everyone’s opinion on everything.
The primary goal on here should be to help everyone find work so they can pay their bills and support their families
AI
AI was already the worst thing to happen to humanity, but now it infected social media like a binary Monkeypox.
LinkedIn now allows you to ‘Write a post with AI’
Adding AI to LinkedIn is like adding sweetcorn to dogshit.
What is the use case here? What product owner identified the need for their faithful users to expect to set the bar so low, that now they don’t even need to write their own bullshit content. They can summon a battery of computers that burn through the same amount of energy of the whole of Argentina uses in a year, to write their cromulent drivel.
Even our business casual bullshit is ruining the planet. Gwen in HR did a 10k for charity and now wants to socialise herself, but like most of the proletariat, knows her input is boring. So she invokes the power of AI to make her WAY more interesting.
So now the original content of LinkedIn, powered by humans, as unfortunate as it was, at least it had a human element. It was crap but it was OUR crap.
Now the worst crap on LinkedIn is powered by AI. What a time to be alive.
AI is trying to emulate our species, yet hasn't reached the basic realisation that to be like humans is to be stupid.
The 2024 new Turing test is ‘can you emulate stupid?’.
LinkedInfluencers
LinkedIn has been tainted by many factors, mostly analogous to the genre.
Social media originally created a wonderful opportunity for humans to connect and thrive, yet also birthed the influencer, which is the waste product of human entitlement.
My two least favourite things to happen to online business humaning are Simon Sinek and Stephen Bartlett.
Let me explain:
Simon Sinek is treated like Nostradamus. Even the snake oil guys were like “yeah lets give this guy a pass”
Stephen Bartlett is not even smart enough to know what snake oil is. But he’d sell it on Dragons Den given half a chance.
Influencers are just people with mental illness being exploited by brands. No functioning adult needs a £50 giant sippy cup. Nobody needs to have the fat sucked out of their face, but please keep that stuff out of the office.
Most people who are selling success wont tell you how they got there. Mostly it’s family money, nepotism, who you know, and a huge sippy cup of luck. It’s not the grind, it’s not ‘founder mode’. It’s being born in the right place at the right time.
Take personal trainers. The only people who benefit from personal trainers are actors or other already successful and beautiful people. And the trainers themselves were born lucky. Have you ever wondered why all personal trainers have perfect bodies? It’s actually less about the gym and more about genetics. It’s WHY they become trainers. Not the other way around. No fat guy with small shoulders ever said ‘I’ll become a personal trainer’ You will NEVER be like them, as the big shoulders, the height, the body fat and the shape are mostly genetics. You cant buy or learn that. Some people have naturally low body fat, and can build lean muscle easily and quickly, it's mostly why they get into sport and fitness.
Look at athletes. No amount of swimming will give you a physiology like Michael Phelps. His genetics defined his choice of sport, not the other way around.
Now apply this to business. Keith in IT is never going to be a CEO. He’s not going to invent an energy drink, or drive a Ferrari, but there are 100’s of ‘Founders’ or ‘Thought Leaders’ on LinkedIn that will sell him a dream.
Imposter Syndrome
LinkedIn is one of the biggest aggressive accelerants of Imposter Syndrome.
If you are suffering from Imposter syndrome, just know that most successful people on here are the product of a mixture of being born in the right place at the right time, luck, nepotism, friends in high places and good old fashioned family money. Most people got there through privilege and entitlement. They won’t admit this but it’s rare to be super successful without these things.
The privileged and entitled don’t ever get imposter syndrome because they feel they deserve to be here. As the game is rigged towards the rich, privileged and entitled, it’s their natural path. That’s the system.
You got here, despite not having those things, you got here through talent and hard work. Imposter syndrome is the price you pay for beating the system.
Coaching
Imagine you don’t know what to do with your career, you are burnt out, you need a change in pace and maybe professionally lost. What are you going to do? Framework that shit baby, become a coach, and you can coach people to be coaches?
Wait what?
Life coaching, is a Ponzi scheme. Need help? Why not pay a life coach to coach you to start coaching. Then you coach people who too end up becoming coaches.
I’ve never met someone who actually got coached to be better. They all end up becoming coaches, as they know it’s good money, minimal formal education and being an *actual* therapist is for grown ups.
OK lets fix some problems
BBRS
First off we need to have a Business Bullshit Ranking System, BBRS.
Someone posts some utter waffle on “what Olympic Breakdancing taught me about SaaS Marketing?”
We hit that BBRS button and caveat that content with a metric that cannot be removed. That person gets a new ranking. A new algorithm that rates the integrity of their content. If it’s rubbish it goes down, soon that person will have to start posting fairly. After a while they will behave themselves.
Privilege scoring
Golf is the original business social network. A ton of successful guys in a clique, gatekeeping success all while sharing a common goal. Getting drunk and doing some business.
I believe golf was invented for the sole purpose of humiliating people whilst trying to network. Just like LinkedIn.
LinkedIn, like golf, would benefit from a handicapping system, to level the playing field, based on a persons actual talent and hard work, versus how much privilege and entitlement they have.
The Bezos problem
Jeff Bezos was an Ivy League graduate, and a hedge fund bro. In 1995, his rich parents gave him a loan of US$245,573 to start Amazon.com
How many people do you know who went to Princeton, had rich parents and could loan them a quarter mill so they could set up a business?
Without those huge privileges, Jeffrey Preston Bezos would be limiting his toilet breaks while working at an online shopping Dotcom warehouse. And no matter how hard he worked, or how much overtime he did, he’d never climb the ladder of privilege. Best he can do is make area manager. But he’d need to know a guy, or that role goes to the stepson of the guy who manages one of the owners houses, as thats how the system works.
You will never be Jeff Bezos, no matter how many books you read, what courses you take or what lunch you consume.
So why not create a fair system where you can put in your privilege ranking, and the less privileged can get a better shot at the hole? Yeah this is like a social affirmative action, and would cause chaos. God forbid regular folk could have a go at this.
Stop feeding the AI
Collaborative articles are just way for LinkedIn to feed their AI with data, and help the machines steal all your lovely insights. It asks you if you want to help answer tough industry questions, you feel flattered yet you are being used. Stop feeding the machines!
How do you think LinkedIn is using this data? It’s taking decent content to give it to people who cant make content, allowing them to ‘Write a post using AI’. All the good stuff is being plagiarised to create the bad stuff automatically. The whole overall quality of the platform does not go up, it goes down further into the bottom of the barrel.
Stop accepting bullshit on your timeline
Look I know I write a bunch of twaddle but start saying no to the bilge on your professional timeline is a good start, even if it means blocking me. I’ll take one for the team if I have to.
Purge
Start pruning your network. Have a cheeky purge. Anyone who posts crap on your timeline gets a warning, and one more chance. Two strikes and you unconnect.
Support
Start liking stuff that genuinely feels helpful and kind. Share stuff that feels legit. Call out toxic posting and tell the truth. If being a pain in the butt on LinkedIn has taught me anything, it’s not affected my ability to get work, it’s made me loads of new, valid connections with smart people who are just sick of the bullshit.
Ok lets wrap this up
Yeah LinkedIn is only going to get worse. I cant help. I tried. It’s just dreadful. It’s like dating apps, it’s supposed to help humans by bringing out the best in them but it only amplifies the worst. Technology affords the democratisation of knowledge yet fails to make our lives better. The rich are getting richer. Simon Sinek is still ‘hawk tua’ing his books. The Bartlett guy blurring the lines of impropriety and malfeasance.
- It has been pointed out to me that this is false
Thanks for reading!
Mx
p.s. If you like this sort of thing I also write about other stuff on my Substack
