LinkedIn is a Joke

Welcome to the latest edition of The Sunday Prompt, where we explore the AI-driven shifts redefining work.

It has been a few weeks since I sent a Sunday Prompt.
The good news? I have been busy with projects I hope to share soon.
The bad? If I can’t give a topic the time it deserves, I hold off.

But this week, something pushed me to write—something that has been pissing me off for a long time. Lately, even more so.

It’s LinkedIn.

It has been broken for a while. Somehow, it keeps finding ways to get worse. Despite all its potential and promise, the platform feels more hopeless than ever. Performative. Algorithmic in the worst way. Thanks in no small part to AI.

So while today’s piece isn’t deeply focused on AI and the future of work, it’s one hop away. And if you will indulge me, I think it will resonate.

Let’s dig in. 👇

Nearly a decade ago, I wrote a piece for VentureBeat entitled Where LinkedIn Went Wrong — and How It Can Save Itself.

My argument was simple: LinkedIn was tearing itself apart trying to be both a social network and an enterprise SaaS company. It shut out developers, hoarded data, and undermined the ecosystem that made it valuable in the first place.

That article ran in March 2016. Three months later, LinkedIn pulled the escape hatch.

It sold itself to Microsoft for $26.2 billion, seeking refuge under the safe cover of a tech giant’s umbrella. Microsoft outlined a bold vision: seamless integration with Office and Dynamics, personalized AI-driven workflows, and a professional productivity hub built on LinkedIn’s graph. Some of that came to pass. Sales Navigator got tucked into Dynamics. Outlook began surfacing LinkedIn profiles. LinkedIn Learning evolved into a solid corporate training tool.

But the deeper promise that LinkedIn would become the connective tissue of modern work never materialized. Instead of becoming a professional operating system, LinkedIn became something far more familiar: a social network chasing engagement and exploiting data to the detriment of its users.

Financially, the deal worked. LinkedIn passed $10 billion in revenue by 2021, and now brings in over $16 billion a year. Microsoft got what it wanted: the data (now training its AI), more ad inventory, more leverage across its enterprise stack.

But the user experience? The core product vision? The mission of real professional connection?

All of it was left behind.

That article and the slow, ongoing unraveling of the LinkedIn user experience have been nagging at me ever since. Not because I got it wrong. Because LinkedIn did.

Under Microsoft’s watch, the issues only deepened: bloated product direction, performative content culture, algorithmic opacity, and a professional network that completely lost its way.

It’s not all that different from Facebook with a “work” filter: chasing attention, short video clips by self-anointed experts and influencers, sponsored and suggested posts clogging my newsfeed, listicles and carousels, and unhinged political rants from both sides. 

Despite all of that, in 2025 LinkedIn is bigger than ever—more users, more content, more engagement. And yet, the experience has never felt so hollow.

So, how did a platform with such potential lose its way so completely, becoming a parody of its former self? The reasons are multifaceted, but they boil down to a few core failures:

1. Thought Leadership Gave Way to Clickbait

LinkedIn used to be a place for professionals to share insight, debate the future of work, and build reputational capital through substance. Now? It’s carousels, how-tos, short videos, and a never-ending litany of humblebrags.

The shift wasn't accidental. LinkedIn leaned into performance. It encouraged emotional posts, personal storytelling, and content engineered to go viral. What was once a platform for professional discourse has become a stage for attention-seeking.

It’s Facebook in a Patagonia vest. Same performance, different costume. Just with fewer cats.

2. It's the Algorithm, Stupid

The algorithm is a black box that rarely delivers what matters. You see content from strangers. Suggested. Promoted. You see the same post for days. You mark topics irrelevant, and they resurface anyway.

This isn't a glitch. It's doing exactly what it was built to do: keep you scrolling.

Like every other social network, LinkedIn runs on the attention economy. Scroll, scroll, scroll. But the content rarely delivers the dopamine rush of Instagram or the addictive pull of TikTok.

And people aren't here to be entertained. They come to learn, connect, and find opportunity. When the feed fails at that, it becomes noise.

3. AI Didn’t Save Your Feed. It Made It Louder.

If you’ve noticed the content and comments becoming more generic, you’re not imagining it. AI-generated posts have flooded your feed with templated thought leadership, vague inspiration, and productivity tips scraped from the internet and lightly reworded by bots. It’s efficient. But it’s also soulless.

AI isn’t the villain here. It’s the accelerant. It lowers the barrier to publishing without raising the bar for substance. In the hands of a skilled operator, it can sharpen a message. In the hands of most, it produces the same post again and again, each accompanied by a different AI-generated headshot.

4. Ghost Jobs and the Erosion of Trust

LinkedIn used to be the go-to destination for serious job seekers and companies serious about hiring. That ship has sailed.

Candidates chase listings that were never meant to be filled, already went to internal hires, or were posted just to gauge the market. Scammers pose as recruiters fishing for personal information. Career coaches flood inboxes with overpriced packages. New openings draw hundreds of applications in minutes.

At a time when white-collar unemployment is surging, LinkedIn should be a bridge. A lifeline. Instead, it's a dead end. The people who need it most have stopped believing it works. Job seekers no longer trust what they see. Recruiters no longer trust what they get. And the entire marketplace is worse for it.

5. The Next Generation Never Opted Out

With large tech platforms, meaningful change rarely comes from within. It usually follows attrition—when users walk away, when a new generation refuses to buy in.

That was my prediction for LinkedIn. That Gen Z would skip the party. That they’d see it for what it is and stay away.

They didn’t.

Nearly 30% of users are 18 to 24. Another 47% are in their twenties and early thirties. Three people join every second. That’s not attrition. Quite the contrary.

And that growth isn’t organic. Career centers push it. Class assignments require it. In fields like consulting, finance, and tech, no profile means no shot. If you’re not on LinkedIn, do you even exist professionally?

It’s not that youngins love LinkedIn. They just don’t have another option. They were supposed to be the agents of change. To challenge the system. Or build what comes next.

Instead, they signed up, optimized their profiles, and fed the beast.

Locked In. Logged Out. Nowhere to Go.

In trying to look like every other social network, LinkedIn is blowing its one real advantage. It holds a unique position, still the only platform of consequence for professionals, despite its best efforts not to be. But by chasing attention, rewarding shallow content, and optimizing for clicks instead of value, it’s attracting the lowest common denominator.

Some of the most connected people I know—founders, investors, engineers, scientists, and executive recruiters—barely touch LinkedIn anymore. Not because they left for something better. There is nothing else. But the platform stopped being useful. For many, it has become a chore.

And that’s the real story here. There is no real alternative—just inertia.

We’ve grown tired. Jaded. Aware of what these platforms take and unsure if what we get in return is worth the squeeze. No one wants to rebuild their network from scratch or painstakingly reconstruct their résumé in yet another app. And no one’s given us a reason to anyway.

That’s strange, isn’t it?

Silicon Valley feeds on disruption. Investment dollars pour into the next disruption before the last disruption has even taken hold. But LinkedIn? Untouched. Not one viable alternative has emerged, or even lurks credibly on the horizon. 

That tells you everything you need to know:

The professional graph is locked up. The switching costs are too high. The platform capture is complete.

Meanwhile, LinkedIn quietly pulled in over $16 billion in revenue last year. Its hiring tools alone made up $7 billion of that. Premium subscriptions? Another $2 billion, up 25% year-over-year.

This is not a sleepy corner of the internet. This is a multi-billion-dollar monopoly, and nobody’s coming for their share.

LinkedIn owns the professional graph.

But they lost the professional.

Not their logins or data. But absolutely their hearts and minds.

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