LinkedIn is fast becoming the new Facebook, as an epidemic of overly personal life updates, cringy memes and virtue signalling has started to dominate the app’s social feeds
It’s no secret that a lot of us are getting fed up with LinkedIn’s attempt to become the hottest social networking platform. There’s even a subreddit page with over 776K users – titled LinkedInLunatics – dedicated to documenting the app’s cringiest, most pretentious posts.
It’s a space where thousands come to vent about the platform’s worst political takes, Boomer memes and “virtue signalling” ego trips. In fact, it’s becoming harder to distinguish it from Facebook. But why has it reached this point?
What started as a place for professionals to network and see what opportunities are on the job market has transformed into a space of social oversharing. Posts now contain 1,000-word explanations on success, or empty motivational speeches telling the reader to “never give up!”
Every social media app has their niche for exploding life updates, for Instagram, it was traditionally used as a lifestyle blog platform. For X, its roots of free speech and LinkedIn is known as the home of career updates. With daily posts about success and achievements it almost seems as though no one on the app has failed at anything. Or if they have, they’ve successfully pushed through the hard time and have written a wordy step-by-step guide to overcoming adversity.
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“I hate that I have to be on LinkedIn it’s truly the worst side of humanity,” one user harshly wrote on X. Another joked: “I opened LinkedIn and the first post read ‘I bought 10 rental properties in 18 months. Here are my top takeaways.’ I hate that app so much lmao.” A user on Reddit, fed up with the app, wrote: “LinkedIn is mostly a waste of time in that it’s filled with a bunch of corporate people who enjoy the smell of their own farts.
“9 times out of 10 it’s just people promoting themselves with some long winded story, riding the coattails of someone else’s long winded story, and people just adding each other so they can inflate one another’s skills,” they ended.
Making your post stand out means having to share “personal experiences and insights” with the aim to “create genuine connections” according to an article about acing LinkedIn’s algorithm in Forbes. This need to make genuine connections has led to the platform becoming too much like other social media platforms and oversharing can seem out of place.
Professional progress reports are being swapped for personal updates and it’s hard to avoid “influential” users often trying to gather a large following than shout about their career news. There’s no denying that LinkedIn can help ensure your portfolio reaches the right people and possibly your next employer, but it’s easy to see that the boundaries for how we use the app have been blurred. Trade expert Maria V. Sokolova wrote: “Call me old-fashioned, but I’m not here for personal diaries or family photo albums. Give me professional information.”
LinkedIn’s oversharing epidemic has led to the app becoming the best place for users to cyberstalk mutuals. Before, Facebook used to contain all the juicy details we may want to know about an ex-best-friend or crush. But with Facebook falling out of favour with its Gen Z users, only 37% of whom are actually active on the platform, it appears that LinkedIn may be filling part of that gap.
“Never have I ever taken my stalking problem to LinkedIn,” one viral TikTok joked. Viewers were quick to reveal their own professional networking stalking habit. “I have two fake accounts on LinkedIn,” the top-voted comment reads, sharing their tricky way of bypassing the awkward “viewed your profile” notification.
“LinkedIn stalking be giving me so much information I could never find anywhere else,” another wrote. And they have a point. With more of us eager to advertise every bit of our lives in an attempt to climb the professional ladder, we may be giving away a little too much.