The Business

Recently, and by that I mean for some time now, LinkedIn has been chock-a-block with postings like this one. You know, the sort of vaguely feel-good stuff that's always permeated the Internet, because playing to people's need for validation generates "likes." Not to mention, in this case, the added bonus of of the never-ending Church of the Wonderful Leader rhetoric that clogs business internet sites. One of these days, maybe I'll put together a list of all of the supposed traits that "leaders" have and ask if it's actually a portrait of a leader, or a description of a confidence artist. But I digress.

When posts like this first started becoming popular on the platform, which by now was several years ago, there was a vocal minority of people who protested, long, loudly and often, that "LinkedIn is not Facebook! Keep LinkedIn Professional!" For a while, there were a few people who seemed to post nothing else. But since this tended to result in them spreading the very content they complained about, I stopped following them.

In the end, they were shouting into an uncaring void. What would change people's behavior on LinkedIn are professional consequences, since LinkedIn is supposed to be about professional networks. But since, as has been pointed out, open prejudice hasn't resulted in Cancel Culture taking root on the platform, it seems unlikely that vague platitudes would spark much of a backlash, either.

But I do wonder what the people at LinkedIn think of it all. Because the proliferation of the allegedly uplifting crowds out the genuinely useful business posts that would otherwise populate one's feed. Or do they? I'm starting to suspect that instead, they fill in the gaps. And this could be LinkedIn's problem, a dearth of useful, business-related content. Vague stories about how someone gave someone a chance and hired them for a job are far more common that posts announcing that someone is actually hiring, and this has been the case since well before the pandemic. Pleas from people desperate for employment are much more common than useful information on the most productive places for them to actually find something.

Even what's left of the news feed tends to be more about "driving engagement" than actually being useful. And since one would think that people would actually click on things that would be useful to them, perhaps this is an admission that those things are scarce. And so maybe being something of a under-the-radar pseudo-Facebook is what LinkedIn is best at being these days. If it's attempting to really be anything different, it doesn't show.