Is LinkedIn The World’s Worst Website?
Public grave-digging for middle management jobs just isn’t quite appealing.

If success was an accurate descriptor for quality, I’d never ask this question. Last year, LinkedIn, the world’s preeminent social networking site for working professionals, was sold for $26.2 billion to Microsoft. The acquisition was simultaneously heralded as an “incalculable value” by Recode and scorned by Forbes, which reported that Microsoft “Wasted $26.2 Billion.” Since the sale, the net worth of LinkedIn’s founder Reid Hoffman jumped to $3.2 billion. So while the consensus on whether it was a good move or bad move for Microsoft was never fully answered, it was unquestionably a good move for the 50-year-old Hoffman, who is also a prominent investor in Airbnb and Groupon.
The financial success of the social media network, which boasts over 106 million active users, (LinkedIn reports over 500 million registered users, but 1/5th actually use it) may cloud the notion of its perfunctory uselessness. As well, it’s provincial purpose — of helping create strong, accessible professional connections and opening up job opportunities — has an undeniable merit: much more so than a number of more popular social networks, which mostly find value in simple entertainment. Coupled with the actual success of some of its millions of users, it seems like LinkedIn’s quality is more than self-evident. Then again, none of that success takes quality into the equation.
Subjectively, LinkedIn is a blithe wasteland, with its native organisms surviving on the never-ending stream of inspirational quote amoeba. While many of its thousands of active users choose to live there, forging unused connection after unused connection to people they’ll never work with or are sure actually exist, most of the returning dwellers are forced to hop back in, looking for a lifeline out of a morose job market that refuses to self-reflect and treat its own wounds. For them, LinkedIn isn’t a social media outlet at all. Rather, it’s a digital DMV, where one has to update their resume and beg for help before they graciously leave, hoping to never come back.
No social media is devoid of toxicity, of course. But LinkedIn’s toxic internals are a bit unique. Considering the site is a primary outlet for career professionals, a casual stroll down a user’s newsfeed generally misses that a huge portion of Americans actually hate their jobs, or at the very best, are completely disengaged at work. However, considering LinkedIn is primarily a networking outlet, the sheer human misery of working culture isn’t apparent.

Job culture and social media culture are a mix that’s both unique and unabashedly hollow. The languid disdain many Americans feel at work is hidden in an algorithm of desperation on LinkedIn, absent of the humanity that breathes a little light in the darkness of Facebook and Twitter. In a way, LinkedIn is exactly like an office party. No one says anything too out of line, too brash, or too interesting.
LinkedIn isn’t a social media outlet at all. Rather, it’s a digital DMV, where one has to update their resume and beg for help before they graciously leave, hoping to never come back.
The common defenses of LinkedIn are among the users who “use it correctly.” LinkedIn, in this sense, is not really a social media outlet, but a networking tool with social media surface features. Use it right and you can build your career in ways that may have not been possible before. But this notion also masks the very important, very focused truth that networking is a truly awful human experience.
Think of a networking event. Even if you haven’t actually attended one, not being there isn’t exactly a prerequisite to know what it’s like. LinkedIn’s purpose is akin to it, in that no one actually wants to go to a networking event — they have to. It’s a surface-level event, where attendees present a fictionalized version of themselves that work culture deems to be appropriate. Like lunch after a funeral, no one is wearing the clothes they normally wear, and nobody is acting the way they normally act.

This gnashed presentation of the human condition that LinkedIn nourishes is both muted and profound. Like a David Lynch film, there’s some morose insanity behind the normal veil. Casual conversations about garbled jargon like lead generation, SEO, triangulated results, failing upwards, and income streams (seriously, I went on the site for less than a minute and saw all these phrases) lurch off the screen in between a not-so-hidden debt crisis and self-realization that this whole effort is just miserable. Large political and economic conversations are less fruitful than they would be on Twitter, a website that is 50 percent robots and about 5 percent anime Nazis, because of the vague professionalism dictates that politics don’t have a place in the working world.
The crushing core of LinkedIn’s vacuous space is caused by layers of reality being stripped away. Ultimately, the site does not mobilize a community actively trying to change the debilitating atmosphere of modern work, rather, it sells advice for how to join it. Because if work culture were radically changed for the better, the need for LinkedIn would disappear.
