When I tell people that I’ve quit social media, I’m not being completely honest:
I’m still on LinkedIn.
For years, I made an exception for LinkedIn, because I considered it an outlier: a social media network that felt useful.
And “felt” is the right word, because was it actually useful? It seemed like there was an actual ROI for my time spent on LinkedIn. Granted, I would struggle to define that ROI—but all of those new connections and responses to recruiters and skimmed HBR articles had to add up to something, right?
Or—the question I’ve started to ask of late—is LinkedIn just more of the same?
When it comes to “social media,” it’s easy to see the trees and forget about the forest. I’ve carved out an exception for LinkedIn, even as it’s obviously still part of the same attention- and data-sucking complex as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and the other social media platforms.
It wasn’t always this way: for a long time, LinkedIn was just an odd backwater of a social media platform. During college and my early career in publishing, I had a profile, but rarely logged on save to glance at a new connection’s profile.
I only started caring about LinkedIn when I started caring about my career.
When I finally grokked the ins-and-outs of my role a few years ago—basically, when I got good at my job—and the internal recognition began happening—promotions, leadership opportunities—LinkedIn started to look different. It seemed like an opportunity to seek career recognition outside my workplace.
I started paying attention to my connections, wanting to surmount the 500-connection plateau—”500+ connections” on some people’s profiles seemed to mean something, even though I knew it was a simply psychological trick to goose engagement. (Dunbar’s number taught me long ago that most of us have a much lower threshold for people in our lives than that.) I even made a handful of “LinkedIn articles,” which gained little traction, though friends were quick to like them.
But—more than anything else—I started to check LinkedIn. Not every day, but more than once a week.
And, sure, there was usually some piece of local business news or Simon Sinek video—but mostly it looked like a professional version of the experience I’d learned to despise on Facebook.
There was the usual company-focused PR posts—new project or product—but there were also the self-promotional posts—people bragging about successes or dispensing productivity koans or—worst of all—role-playing fealty to their current employer in over-laudatory terms.
I found myself doing something terrible: scrolling.
It was exactly what they want—they want me to scroll. The more I scroll, the more ads I see.
What’s so insidious about LinkedIn is that it preys on a legitimate feeling—pride in my career and my work. Without ever saying as much directly, LinkedIn suggests that my value on LinkedIn ought to reflect my value in my actual workplace.
But we know that’s not true.
LinkedIn also accentuates a larger problem, something that I’ve struggled with in my new hybrid-work paradigm—the erasure of a divide between my personal and work selves. LinkedIn doesn’t care about any such divide. LinkedIn doesn’t want to limit itself to weekdays and the 9-5 any more than any other social media platform, and that alone should give us pause.
Could it be as easy as—?
[deletes LinkedIn app off phone]
Well, obviously not. But it’s a start—a good first step in helping me see LinkedIn as another social media platform, not as an extension of my career.
Taylor Coe 