Transcription
LinkedIn is the worst social media platform ever made. You see, maybe you're just searching for a job, or you might just be trying to do some networking. Whatever you're trying to get out of it, LinkedIn is sure to disappoint.
Trying to use it to actually get a job is completely soul crushing, especially for new graduates. You've spent years on your education, grinding away to eventually get qualified for a good job. Then you can't find a job. No matter how hard you try, you just get strung along by multi-stage interviews and flaky recruiters.
That's where LinkedIn comes in. With its monthly subscriptions and promises of a way into the professional world, the platform preys on the hopeful. You can spend months or even years looking for a job on the platform, slowly losing your savings and your sanity as the never-ending search drags on. The worst part is it doesn't seem like there's an alternative anymore.
Today, the site is full of empty corporate bragging, AI-written slop, and con artists. Making a real connection with your connections is very rare, but you've got to try and deal with this all to try and break into lots of industries. The site's full of posts like this. This woman is making up stories about how her LinkedIn follower count finally won her daughter's respect. All of that just to sell her book and brag online. Millions of these posts pollute the site every day, and the people making them have no idea how cringe-worthy they are.
But surprisingly, that's not the worst part about LinkedIn. It isn't the scam recruitment messages or the humble brags or even the CEOs posting crying selfies after firing people. The worst part is that sooner or later, you're forced to join in. In the corporate world, you're massively missing out if you don't adopt a fake persona. Fill your profile with inspirational quotes and pretend that you live for the rat race. If you don't dance the dance, then your career could suffer. You might have spent countless hours on the site sending out applications and bashing your head against the brick wall of the modern jobs market, but unfortunately for lots of people, it's unavoidable.
Today, LinkedIn is a key part of the modern corporate workplace. The culture on the platform is just a reflection of what's going on in offices around the world. But as we'll find out, it's also played a role in creating that culture in the first place. And it's all thanks to a man named Reed Hoffman.
Now, Hoffman is up there with the biggest names in tech. He lives and breathes Silicon Valley. But unlike other tech billionaires, Hoffman never relied on his image to get ahead. Instead, people knew him as the man with the connections. In the wake of the dot-com bubble in the early 2000s, he was the guy everyone wanted to know in Silicon Valley. If he saw potential in you or your company, then he had 1,000 big names he could introduce you to.
A large part of this was thanks to his prominent position at PayPal. People always remember Elon Musk and Peter Thiel from the PayPal mafia, but it was actually Hoffman pulling the strings in the background. Thiel gets the credit for being one of the first investors in Facebook, for example. But it was Hoffman who actually brokered the meeting and introduced him to Mark Zuckerberg. While all of this contributed to his fortune, it wasn't what made him who he is today. Instead, Reed took his focus on connections and turned it into a product.
In the late '90s, Hoffman had been involved with one of the first social media networks called socialnet.com. It failed, but the experience taught him valuable lessons about virality and how to get a platform off the ground. A few years later, Hoffman was already rich on PayPal money and had all the connections in Silicon Valley he needed. But he saw an opportunity. While other entrepreneurs were busy messing around with generic social networks, he was going to create one for the corporate world.
When it launched in 2003, LinkedIn was very simple. It was basically a way for you to put your resume online and connect to other people. Hoffman wasn't even the first to think of the idea, but his connections and business sense meant he had the head start he needed. He had a two-stage plan for growth, which he later explained in a 2014 interview with Sam Ultman. The first part revolved around getting the very first users on board. For this, Hoffman could just use his growing Silicon Valley connections.
"How did you get the first million or even the first thousand users for LinkedIn?"
"So, first thousand was easy. We just sent out invitations."
The site soon picked up momentum as other big names in Silicon Valley quickly joined in. But it still wasn't nearly enough. Hoffman had to tap into a very human fear that you're missing out. He needed people to think that everyone they knew was on the site, that they would be left behind if they didn't join in, that their careers would just be overshadowed by everyone else.
This was where stage two came in, mining people's address books. "The probably the key thing that we innovated, and we were the first people to do this, that then caused the growth curve to change was upload your address book and see who else you knew was in LinkedIn."
Hoffman is only showing people half the picture here. He's leaving out how all of this really worked. LinkedIn might never have succeeded if they didn't start pushing their own plug-in for Outlook. It seemed simple to the first users. It told them it would just take all of their existing email contacts and check if they were on LinkedIn. Then the site would ask users if they wanted to invite other people. It was deliberately vague, making it seem like they could already be on the site and that you were just sending a friend request. Instead though, people would accidentally send out mass emails to the whole address book inviting them all to LinkedIn. Even though it did take around three emails on average for someone to join the platform, the sheer volume of invitations was enough and LinkedIn grew like a weed.
The tactic worked and their initial growth projections were incredibly ambitious. But LinkedIn still surpassed them by more than double. Imagine how much better LinkedIn would be today if it just still looked like an address book. You wouldn't have to wade through the knee-high quagmire of scam artists and useless posts. You could just connect with the people you needed to and get directly to the source. The job market would be far simpler and you wouldn't need to spend 40 hours a week applying to jobs just to have a slim chance. Things would still be hard, but they would be a whole lot easier as well.
But to monetize his product as much as he could, Hoffman had to go beyond these societal constraints. He had to push people's psychology further. To do this, he hacked into the same fear of missing out that the site had used to grow, offering people who paid further reach than the people who didn't. By 2005, just 2 years after launch, LinkedIn then rolled out their InMail service. For a monthly fee, people could go beyond the people they had connected with and send spam messages to tons more people. They could even message people over three degrees of separation away from them. Friends of friends of friends. Their press release even admits that most of these messages wouldn't get replies, but people still ate it up anyway.
And so this was the beginning of LinkedIn's monetization. Today, it's grown to astronomical levels, $30 a month for individuals. The way they sell it is telling, dangling stats about how much more likely you are to get a job. Really, if you have a job, you don't need the subscription, so it's in their interest to keep you searching. Over time, LinkedIn would slowly create higher tiers and more ways for people to do this, adding in Premium Plus accounts, business accounts, all sorts of layers and artificial restrictions in the way of what the site used to do for free. It's just the classic startup strategy. Start out with a good system supported by investor cash, then make it worse while squeezing the user base for money once you've got them hooked.
LinkedIn grew fast, so Hoffman could start this process quickly. First to a thousand, then to a million, then quickly to a 100 million users in the space of a few years. But even at this early stage, LinkedIn was already starting to embrace ideas from other social media platforms. In 2007, for example, they began to build infrastructure for people to upload professional photos for their profiles. It was a small and necessary step for the site, but it still watered down the initial goal of LinkedIn being solely dedicated to making business connections. Pictures of smiling professional people helped create the impression that LinkedIn was popular and worth joining while slightly lowering the amount of actually useful information on the site.
Later in 2012, LinkedIn pivoted away from connections almost entirely. They then began letting people follow other accounts just like Twitter. At first, it was just for a few select people like big CEOs or politicians. They could also make their own posts talking about personal stories or their tips for business or whatever else was on their mind. But pretty soon, it extended to everyone. People were pushed towards treating the site like a sanitized corporate version of Twitter.
That same year, they also let people add more pictures, videos, and other personal branding onto their profiles. The platform was now starting to look a lot more like Instagram and Twitter. The reasons were obvious. Like other social media sites, engagement was king for LinkedIn, and they wanted people spending as much time on the platform as possible. This meant hiding the old barebones professional parts of the site, replacing it with more content and visual elements instead.
The incentives of getting rewarded with actual benefits like professional connections and job offers quickly moved onto the site itself. No longer was this about getting rewarded with actual benefits like professional connections and job offers. Soon enough, it wasn't just about chasing that key introduction with an influential person like people had done in real life. Rather, the incentive was now about gathering likes and followers and online clout.
LinkedIn had created a parallel dimension to the workplace, a more liquid corporate world where your false corporate persona becomes your entire identity. In the real world, you can only really humble-brag and sell yourself to the people physically in front of you. And your ability to do this is governed by social convention. If you do it too much or too obviously, people just see through it. So, LinkedIn took that corporate fakeness and turned it into a competition. You could now create a whole profile full of humble-bragging stories and a list of your achievements dressed up to sound as impressive as possible. Whoever could rub their success in other people's faces in the most engaging way would get pushed to the top of the algorithm. It's how you can get posts like this after years of this process. Gary doesn't see any problems with bragging about how his wife might leave him as he's completely invested in the parallel world of LinkedIn instead. And he's turned his impending personal tragedy into just a lesson for wannabe entrepreneurs.
LinkedIn fully intended on creating this ecosystem. In 2015, they fully dove in, adding a social media-style content feed they had borrowed from a startup they bought a few years before. This was the final nail in the coffin, and LinkedIn has just never been the same since. Before, LinkedIn had been about enhancing the professional connections you already had and extending your reach. Over its first decades, though, that completely changed. The idea became for users to use online clout to get job offers and actual career benefits. Whether that actually worked, though, was another matter entirely. LinkedIn still dangled the carrot of career success in front of its users' faces even after it became a pipe dream.
You could say that this was all just a coincidence. There were clear reasons to do all of this that any modern tech company could recognize. Engagement equals profit when you're running ads and trying to get people to sign up to monthly fees. Plus, LinkedIn users are some of the most profitable users out there. Lots of people are happy to spend vast amounts of money as business expenses. And LinkedIn charges massive amounts for recruitment features. So why not try and create an ecosystem full of engaging content rather than just an address book and a bunch of dry CVs?
But it wasn't just profit. Reed Hoffman knew that changing and improving the very nature of the workspace would make LinkedIn an essential part of the modern corporate world. "What I'm most interested in is how do we essentially make products that make us much better as a group, both better for us individually and better for the system." Reed had already tried to make a social network and failed. But with LinkedIn, he could slowly build the user base, then add in the social media infrastructure later on to squeeze even more money out of it. Once it gained momentum, it would achieve his goals of improving people and changing them to better fit into systems.
What does that really mean? Just take a look at how LinkedIn has changed people and adapted them for corporate life. Today, joining LinkedIn means joining the corporate marketplace. But it isn't a free market. The entire platform is designed to be as good for employees as possible while also taking as much of the power away from employees as possible.
Searching for a job on LinkedIn is soul-crushing because of how it's set up. You might get tons of messages at first, but 99% of them aren't going to be relevant or trustworthy. Instead, they'll be from recruiters sending messages to thousands of people. They might not be hiring for your location. They might not be hiring for your actual job title. It just doesn't even matter. They only want information and maybe to hack your account if they're particularly malicious. With all their money and power over their own platform, LinkedIn could easily crack down on this, but they don't. Maybe because it increases engagement and keeps people coming back to the site to check their notifications.
Going the other direction and applying to jobs yourself isn't likely to work either. LinkedIn is full of so-called ghost jobs. Job openings that get advertised on the site but aren't actually real. Lots of companies want it to look like they're always hiring. There are tons of benefits to doing this. They have a continual steady flow of applicants without really having to do anything. If they ever get someone vastly overqualified who doesn't know their own worth, it pays for itself. They might not even have a job opening. They're just looking to see who's out there. Today, the ghost job rate is at 30%, including on LinkedIn. In some industries, it's double that. So, depending on your job, over half of the applications you spend days working on aren't actually going anywhere. We're not built to deal with these levels of rejection, constantly banging your head against the wall with no reward. But going through this process better conditions you for corporate life.
Lots of these problems aren't unique to LinkedIn, though. They just make the situation on the site that much worse. The real problem that LinkedIn creates is based on what it rewards and how it forces people to portray themselves. Creating a good profile on LinkedIn is much more similar to making a dating app profile than to writing a CV. To stand out on the platform today, you need to maximize the visual appeal. People add insane job titles, dressing up their actual experience to look amazing with as many big corporate buzzwords as possible. The amount of job posts you make, the hashtags you include, and the reach they have are far more important now than your actual achievements. Obviously, having good real-world experience will still help, but it doesn't matter nearly as much as it used to. Your profile will likely get lost in the noise.
That's another problem. Just like dating apps, you're subtly competing with far more people than you were before. Recruiters are comparing your CV and your profile to people across the world. LinkedIn isn't going to restrict who they see. The results are the same on LinkedIn for employees as they are for men on Tinder. The numbers just don't add up, and there are far more employees looking for jobs and men looking for women. Just like with men on dating apps, lots of people employ the shotgun approach. They just send out thousands of applications to whatever jobs they can find, regardless of if they're actually qualified. Suddenly, you're trying to get heard and noticed even though hundreds of people are sending in applications at the same time as you. Your application might be well considered. You might be the best candidate, but if you never actually give your application any proper thought, then it just doesn't matter.
Meanwhile, just like on Tinder, the illusion of choice makes employers far more picky. They wait for months or even years for that dream candidate to come along, ignoring all the real people who try to apply. Through all this rejection and all this useless work, people looking for a job still have to keep up this illusion. They have to pretend to employers that they're happy and positive and so incredibly excited to work at such a fast-paced, innovative company. It's just the same performance that people have done in offices around the world for years, but now LinkedIn has made it a 24/7 process.
Don't believe me? People even have to keep up the performance after they've lost their jobs. Just have a look at some of these posts made after Meta fired 11,000 employees in 2022. They'll talk about how amazing Meta was despite just being fired. They'll say how grateful they were for their time at the company. They might talk about the overwhelming outpouring of support. Lots of them will post pictures of their dog or their children, another way that Instagram culture has leaked in. They all read out exactly the same way. And that's kind of the point. It's all a performance they're being forced to play out just to advertise they're looking for a job again.
At the same time, companies couldn't care less about how they fire people. They'll lay off thousands with pre-recorded video messages or emails. Some employees have only found out after their security keys stopped working on the doors. This is the final effect of LinkedIn and the reason why it's so malicious to people's sense of self-worth. Before, being fired was the opportunity to finally leave the corporate performance behind. You could let loose, take a deep breath, and for at least a little while be yourself. But today, you have to keep up the facade. The show must go on, and you need to make these kinds of posts, all while having the knowledge that the terrible process of the job hunt is waiting for you around the corner.
LinkedIn is only going to get worse. Now AI has made the platform even more full of spam. Anyone can get ChatGPT to write an emoji-filled post about synergy in the workplace. And LinkedIn will spread that slop to thousands of people. Meanwhile, LinkedIn is hoovering up all the posts and data to train their own AI models, including all the information you put on the site about yourself. If you don't want that happening, you need to leave now.
Now, you should do whatever it takes to succeed, but at the same time, giving in and going along with this modern corporate performance isn't truly necessary to keep yourself sane and to keep some part of you alive. You can't give yourself completely to the corporate rat race. Otherwise, you might just end up actually believing in all of this nonsense.