I’ve joined LinkedIn in 2009. It’s been a useful tool for seeing what people I knew were up to, re-connection, and reaching out. Whilst LinkedIn has always been aggressive with emailing and notifications, exquisitely paired with a spyware-like mobile app1, it was still worth it back when I ran a business.
In the past few years, however, my business-related activity has reduced and the platform has changed, for the worse, and with it its usefulness. It’s now a typical social network, like the ones I’ve always avoided (Facebook, Instagram) or removed myself from (Twitter/X). LinkedIn is now only useful for me as a platform for hating on LinkedIn; I get very little business-related use out of it2.
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LinkedIn is the natural home of the humblebrag — “does anyone else’s phone noticeably heat up when your posts go viral?”, “putting some work in waiting for my take-off slot” — where anywhere else, showing-off like this is obviously obnoxious. It’s where people regularly fib about their experiences at work and why they left (“…thankful for an incredibly rewarding journey with super 10X friendly geniuses and management.”); awkwardly shill for their employer (“it was a privilege to be part of the team that supported the team that changed the colour of this button!“); harness personal tragedies to yarn a cockamamy story that ends with self-promotion or some contrived wisdom (“my grandmother died and I learned a valuable lesson about my crypto hustle.”); describe failure as success (“I’ve decided to shut down my mental-health AI startup due to ethical concerns.“); promote toxic hustle culture (“sleeping is over-rated; bed-frames are for lazy people.“); posts praising AI that read like a cry for help (“I don’t code anymore, and it’s most definitely the most wonderful thing that ever happened to me.“); and Elon worshiping (“he will notice my drooling and invest in my startup!“).
I’ve even seen someone proudly adopt an employee-employer relationship with their young children, complete with white-board sessions, one-to-ones, weekly/monthly/yearly goals, and performance reviews… but no one seemed as nauseated as I was about this shit.
There are a couple more emerging things that I don’t want to personally experience maturing. LinkedIn decided it’s going to innovate in the puzzle-game industry… apparently to make it easier for people to connect (video doubles as “how to badly fake product-launch-enthusiasm”). What’s next, LinkedIn? A dating feature also helps people connect.
And the big one, AI. There’s now a lot of talk about AI agents for “managing” your LinkedIn and social media while you sleep. Next are AI profiles and recruiter AI agents bombarding your feed and inbox with perfectly crafted messages and roles that are also perfectly useless. All of this at a time where we already can’t believe anything we see or hear. No thanks.
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I will soon delete content from my LinkedIn account and keep it only as a placeholder so it can’t be squatted. I will then disable all notifications and log-out. I decided to do this instead of deleting the account altogether — which may still happen later — also so that people can find me more easily, and that I’m still able to get in touch with lost connections. I won’t be contributing to the platform anymore, except for the presence of my account.
Those who’d like to keep in touch are sincerely encouraged to email me at me@saardrimer.com and subscribe to this newsletter3. Here’s one of my paintings.
I installed the app quite a long time ago, before Android allowed for finer controlled permissions, and it asked for access to everything. I uninstalled it after a short while and never allowed it on my phone since. I also disabled most notifications.
Opportunities that came through LinkedIn never materialised whilst those that came from elsewhere did much better.
Substack is the last social network I’m on or likely to ever be on; it is already turning into a cesspit like all the others, but with enough margin to let me figure out where to move to or quit altogether.
1 - Nice painting!
2 - I've been using LinkedIn more recently as I've been needing to sell my services a bit more. It's good for reaching out to people in industry etc. But yeah, much of the feed stuff is garbage.
3 - Substack is a good platform for email distribution. No reason to quit the core of that at least. You can always pull your email list out and use another service. That's the big draw IMO.
4 - Was going to make some joke about 10x or something, but I'm having a bit of writer's block. Could ask ChatGPT I guess, but that would be a little too... meta (if that's how you use that word) and/or hypocritical.
I would always eventually lose contact with ex-colleagues. LinkedIn solved that problem, but then the ick set in. Like you, I still keep my account as a placeholder and way of keeping those contacts updated. But now I'm not sure I even dare to sign-in after the browsergate.eu revelations .. verified "not crackpot" per www.grc.com/sn/sn-1073.htm!!
and yes, lovely painting!