What Is LinkedIn For Anymore? I’m Starting to Forget.

I Used to Enjoy Being Here.

Over the past six months, I have started to hate LinkedIn.

Yes, hate. I know the word I’m using.

Sometimes I think my life would be better without it. Then I remember that I run a business, want people to discover what I’m building and still find useful connections there.

So I come back.

Not exactly a glowing customer testimonial.

It is a strange relationship: a place I once enjoyed has become somewhere I feel obliged to visit. And lately, I keep asking the same question.

What exactly is LinkedIn for anymore?

Everybody has a story. Somehow, it always contains 47.

You know the posts.

Forty-seven rejections. Forty-seven lessons. Forty-seven days to change everything.

Somewhere between the rejection and the revenue milestone, somebody stared out of a window and discovered leadership.

I’m reading García Márquez, apparently. Except at the end of this particular novel, I need to comment “GROWTH” to receive a PDF.

Why does everything need this much drama?

A difficult week can just be a difficult week. A business achievement can be interesting without an emotional origin story. Sometimes the electricity goes out and you wait for it to come back.

We don’t always need to extract a leadership framework from the darkness.

“Most people” are apparently idiots

Another familiar opening:

“Most people don’t understand…”

Wonderful. I’ve barely arrived and already somebody has established their intellectual superiority over the room.

Then comes the correction.

This isn’t X. It’s Y.

Every subject becomes a revelation. Every ordinary observation arrives dressed as something the rest of humanity has somehow failed to notice.

And someone has the contact details of 100 family offices.

Comment “FAMILY” and they’ll send them.

Brother. What is this?

If the information is useful, explain what it is, where it came from and why it matters. Why must every interaction feel like the first stage of a funnel?

The inbox offers little relief. Another stranger wants fifteen minutes. Another message begins with suspicious enthusiasm about my profile before getting to the thing they sell.

I don’t mind people doing business. I do business.

I mind the performance of personal interest when the message could have been sent to anybody.

We have reversed the thinking-to-publishing ratio

People used to think twice and write once.

Now they think once and publish ten times.

Or outsource the entire sequence:

“ChatGPT, write me a LinkedIn post.”

Before somebody gets excited, I use AI to write. I’m using it to help shape this article. The opinions, irritation and examples are mine.

That distinction matters to me.

AI can help someone express a thought. It cannot give them a reason to have that thought in the first place.

My impression is that plenty of people are no longer posting because they have something to say. They are looking for something to say because they feel they must post.

The publishing schedule has become more important than the thought.

And the result is a feed full of polished sentences that I forget before I finish reading them.

Now we’re arguing about impressions, too

Recently, my Instantly post had fewer than 30 impressions when I checked.

I also saw a woman say that, despite having 300,000 followers, her previous day’s post hadn’t reached 200 impressions. That was her account of it, not something I independently verified.

My immediate reaction was that LinkedIn must be broken. Or hacked.

Sarcasm, before someone opens an incident report.

But the frustration is real. You put effort into something, publish it and stare at a number that gives you very little explanation.

LinkedIn has publicly described changes to its feed, including more personalised ranking and reduced distribution of repetitive content and engagement bait. Its March explanation sets out that direction.

That does not establish why my particular post performed badly, or prove a platform-wide collapse.

It does make the current atmosphere slightly absurd: people producing content about why their content is no longer reaching people.

Even LinkedIn says the human part matters

In its June update on keeping conversations real, LinkedIn explicitly said using AI to help write is acceptable, while stressing that posts should represent the person’s own voice and perspective.

It also described efforts to reduce the spread of generic AI-generated content.

Separately, the platform has explained its action against engagement pods and automated comments.

I agree with the direction.

But announcing authenticity is easier than making a platform feel authentic.

From my side of the screen, the experience still involves a considerable amount of theatre.

If LinkedIn disappeared tomorrow, what would we actually miss?

I would miss some people.

Useful introductions. Interesting conversations. The opportunity to put my work in front of someone who might genuinely care.

Those things have value. They are why I haven’t left.

I would not miss the manufactured epiphanies, the compulsory drama or the stranger explaining what “most people” fail to understand.

I don’t need every post to be profound. I’d happily take something small, specific and honest.

Tell me what you built. What went wrong. What you noticed. Something funny. Something useful.

And if you have nothing to say today, that is also fine.

The world can survive twenty-four hours without your forty-seven lessons.