The "Facebook-ization" and cringe on LinkedIn

I’ll start off with 2 recent posts by self annointed visionaries and thought leaders which created a storm in the social media world.

While the first post was probably intended to tell kids to embrace the grind and hustle culture early in your career, the second one was a little more head scratching and made me wonder if the author had read one too many books on productivity recently.

Anyway, both posts went viral - the world was outraged, nuance (as usual) went for a toss and both these startup CEOs definitely got the attention they yearned for (any publicity is good publicity?)

Now, these posts got me thinking - from when did LinkedIn become a Facebook under the very flimsy garb of professional networking? How did this happen?

LinkedIn, in its purest form is a place where you

• Connect with people for professional intentions such as sales, job hunting, etc

• For HRs and recuiters to source talent

• For you to mould your brand and maybe create some niche around yourself

While this still stays, you see LinkedIn becoming far more used for:

• Shitty content which is remotely “professional” (a LOT of senior people like the gentleman below have gained mass following on the back of this)

  

  

• Unoriginal “inspirational” content which just recycles the same old stories

• Cringe inspiration

  

• Clickbait posts with the only intention of making it go viral. A lot of these posts end with phrases such as “agree?”, “what are your thoughts”, “Like if you agree”

  

• Absolute cringe things (borderline NSFW) which you wont even find on Facebook

On a side note, there are things that you notice on LinkedIn that give me a serious complex such as:

• People declaring that they’ve joining new jobs. Example - Someone joined PwC as an financial auditor and claimed “exciting times ahead”. Sure.

• Remember how a a few years ago -EVERYONE was an analyst - even folks in sales called themselves “growth analysts”. Now, EVERYONE is a product manager in some form or another

  

• People who write their entire CV in their profile header

  

Off late, you' will also see a lot of shit posting and parody (I am always pro shitpostings - it brings sanity and a sense check to all the cringe out there)

I dont know much about why LinkedIn’s algo functions - do they want such content to go viral in order to attract more users and increase the network effect which is so critical to the success of any social media? Are they trying to reduce such content but the monster is too big to be tamed? Are they simply indifferent or unaware?

However, what I can take a shot at is to guess why LinkedIn is becoming more and more like Facebook -

• Facebook has become too uncool to post content on - each time I open it, I really dont get any reason to want to open the site again (Apart from checking birthdays of a few relevant people once a fortnight)

• Twitter is too niche a platform and the interface doesn’t allow for the same type of visibility (280 characters) as LinkedIn. If you ignore the trolls, Twitter is easily far more intellectual a platform then LinkedIn.

• You cannot write long fake stories as easily on the Instagram UI -its USP is photos/short videos

• Older people and visionary leaders feel the need to be self annointed gurus and keep imparting gyan (like the gentleman from Reliance above) - they are not active on FB, their kids probably dont listen to them in real life and hence they need to vomit their gyan on LinkedIn to a ready audience of thousands of young followers who in turn are only happy to validate their gyan with thousands of likes

There is a silver lining in all of this - amidst all the cringe and generic/copy pasted content on LinkedIn, there is a LOT of scope for branding yourself with sensible and original content. Even if this content does not go viral to 50000 people, it moulds your virtual persona amongst (say) 250-500 people who matter more.

I’ll end with a blast from the past - remember Quora?