Why LinkedIn is Bad for the Internet
By: Adam Sullivan
Tags: Slack, LinkedIn, Jeff Weiner, Microsoft

Jeff Weiner has no idea how to leverage LinkedIn as a platform. “But he sold to Microsoft! For twenty-six billion fucking dollars!” you declare. Ooook. I won’t argue with you there. Good job, Jeff. You made the acquisition happen, and as a user, I couldn’t be more proud. We’re eleven years into your reign and counting, and now it’s time to step aside and let someone else run the company. I know that won’t happen, and I really don’t care if it does, because your network is genuinely a piece of shit, but it’s what would be best for the company and its users. Call a spade a spade. The company needs a new direction.

Ask yourself, what does LinkedIn actually do? What utility does it provide its users? I’ve written about this social network before because there clearly is a use case for it. Since then, not only have they failed to make any functional changes, they forwent an enormous opportunity to shift to a service with the usability of something like Slack. This was before Slack even existed — the opening was there. And AngelList serves the investment community (and has its own set of problems, but I won’t get into that here). So…what the fuck?

Well, let’s look to LinkedIn’s vision which is to, “Create economic opportunity for every member of the global workforce.” The mission is to, “Connect the world’s professionals to make them more productive and successful.” While it’s not my job to determine the direction of LinkedIn, in its current form, it’s not only useless but also detrimental to its users and the internet as a whole. It should infuriate you that a social network like LinkedIn even exists. Why? Because human beings are legitimately wasting precious hours of their lives on something that is an illusion. The whole thing is a charade. Users have been lulled into a sense of complacency of expectation. That’s dangerous. Do you know anyone whose life was changed by using the service? Or heard of anybody who heard of someone whose life was changed by service? As far as I can tell, LinkedIn’s greatest asset is harvesting user data. Yay. Powerful.

Additionally, anecdotal observations of the network reveal something to me: there is this mirage by those who use it, it’s as if they’re assuming the information they’re receiving is somehow enlightened; like a network can exist detached from the rest of the internet with the emotion and politics removed. It bleeds through the tone of the feed. It haunts the spirit of the network. After I stopped taking LinkedIn seriously, over the years I posted some outlandish shit on there (by LinkedIn standards) just to fuck with the network. I thought (and still think) it was fucking HILARIOUS. I’m not claiming it had any impact at all — only negative impact on me, I’m sure. Since then, I’ve stopped using it almost entirely. My brother deleted his LinkedIn years ago. So why write this? I’m perturbed that LinkedIn has failed to evolve in any meaningful way, a generation of users is lost, and they’ve created a vacuum of trust in the whole concept of what they’re trying and failing to be.

Brb gonna go be a good boy and rejuvenate my professional career on LinkedIn for a few hours. No way anyone on there could or would search for and inspect my Twitter which is, oh, ever so carefully crafted to please the masses, and my mommy.

If you think I’m writing this to be an asshole or to get the satisfaction of a brutal takedown of LinkedIn, you’d be mistaken. And I’m not going to offer further solutions because I’m not going to do LinkedIn’s fucking job for them. I’m writing this because it comes as naturally as breathing.

I’ll leave you with this story: