Why LinkedIn is doomed
The sad state of the world’s worst social network
Remember when LinkedIn was good? Yeah, me neither.
In 2016, the company reported it had over 450 million members, but only 110 million were using the website on a monthly basis. Not much later, Microsoft scooped up the company for a cool $26 billion, gave it a fresh coat of paint, and that’s where we are today.
Founded in 2001 with the exciting promise of becoming a business-focused social network, over the years it slowly turned into a spammy mess of random connection requests and irrelevant information. Instead of becoming the world’s go-to hub for professional communication, I now find myself trying to avoid the platform as much as possible.
How did we get here? Why is LinkedIn so bad? And where is it going?
The world’s worst social network
Ever looked at your Facebook feed and thought “Wow, all of this is terribly uninteresting”? LinkedIn is worse.
An example of something you might find in your feed:
LinkedIn is riddled with stuff like this. It’s a cesspool of terrible content, with the worst posts inexplicably going viral. At best, it’s something you’ve already seen somewhere else. At worst… you don’t want to know.
After skimming my feed, I turn to the connection requests tab — as always, there’s a bunch of people I’ve never met asking to connect. A couple of minutes after accepting them, a message appears in my inbox:
This would have been most impersonal thing someone has ever sent me, if it wasn’t the third time this week. New connections often reach out with copy-and-pasted cold messages in a desperate attempt to get something out of the deal.
It seems everyone wants to be connected with everyone for no reason, making the network effect practically worthless and the content in your news feed even less relevant.
What are those 450M people doing, then?
Okay, there are a couple of legitimate reasons why you could end up on LinkedIn, the big one being its Jobs section — it’s not a bad way to find a job.
Loads of openings are posted every day, and it’s possible to set detailed alerts for specific roles or locations. Some employers even offer to apply just by submitting your profile, speeding up the process.
But there’s a catch — millions of people apply through LinkedIn, making this a common sight:
The network’s scale of makes it almost impossible to stand out — with so many people chasing the same jobs, it might be worth reaching out in a different way. The rise of specialised boards for remote jobs, art jobs or tech jobs shows some applicants are already seeing the value of reaching out through more relevant channel.
LinkedOut
Is it too late for LinkedIn to avoid total uselessness? Probably not — under Microsoft’s wing the service is sure to exist in one form or another for the next couple of years.
But competitors aren’t sitting still. Earlier this year, Facebook announced its new Jobs feature, making it possible for Page owners to post an open position at their company. Users can easily apply without leaving the website or app, making it virtually effortless.
Even though the new functionality is currently only being tested on a small group of users, an eventual rollout to all of its 1.86 billion monthly active members could deliver a serious blow to LinkedIn’s market dominance.
Nobody knows where the company will be in a couple of years, or what use its service will still have, but I wouldn’t be surprised to see this prediction by Honest Slogans being painfully close to the truth:
