LinkedIn — Yet Another Cringy-Vanity Platform

Do you find yourself opening your LinkedIn app and then closing it within a minute because it just doesn’t appeal anymore?

Gursharan Singh
New Writers Welcome
3 min readApr 20, 2024

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Photo by Alexander Shatov on Unsplash

When I first heard of LinkedIn in 2010 during my days in a business school, I was super-excited about the platform. The platform was touted as an Orkut/Facebook for working professionals who wish to engage with each other for:

  1. Networking for Business Opportunities
  2. Networking for Employment opportunities
  3. Voicing opinions on matters related to management science, business, economy, commerce, science, technology and related fields
  4. Knowledge dissemination & absorption in different lines of work
  5. Advisory and Mentoring

Cut to mid-2020s, about a decade and a half later — it has evolved. While it still caters to people for points 1, 2, and 3 mentioned above, something has changed about the platform which has sort of diluted the space for points 4 and 5. And in doing so, new pointers have been added to my observation.

  1. An endless stream of pointless positivity: A lot of social media influencers have sprung up in recent years to use LinkedIn to spread their reach and monetize it with life-coaching paraphernalia. While it’s great to stay positive and motivated in both professional and personal modes of our lives, in the last few years the barrage of motivational content (blogs, stories, anecdotes, catchy one-liners) that’s stamped on our LinkedIn feeds almost makes it both excessive and ineffective. Is it not ok to feel down and lazy on some days and be laid back? I am 37 years old, and I really don’t care anymore if someone wakes up at 5 am, meditates, drinks ginger-lemon-honey tea, and is a ‘hustler’.
  2. Vanity and self-gratification: People nowadays post newly acquired internships/certifications/degrees, pictures of every seminar or conference they visit, and even of the lunch they have with their team. People of younger age groups (18-25) have started posting huge Thank-you notes (that are bigger than most Medium stories) upon getting admission into a college or getting their first employment, or merely for completion of a college project. Even seasoned professionals frequently posting pictures of some ordinary certifications/programs makes me feel as if people engage in these development programs more for non-stop instant vanity than upskilling. While engaging in all that may be great for one’s self-esteem and confidence, do I, as a regular LinkedIn user, really want to know all that about my connections every day? And lastly, there are these deeply vanity-fueled cringy posts, mostly by influencers or wannabe-influencers, of them posting screenshots of their own posts made on other platforms like Twitter, trying so desperately to gain attention and more followers.
  3. Spamming: As it happens with most online networking and communication media and platforms, LinkedIn too has allowed its space to be used for ads which in turn creates a lot of noise for most regular users. Add to this the hundreds of ‘Happy Birthday’ messages you get on that one day every year, or heaps of ‘Congrats!’ on a new employment or promotion almost makes me doubt whether I am dealing with humans or bots.
  4. Political & Religious posts/forwards: This is probably the latest category of content that one can notice on LinkedIn these days, especially if you are from my part of the world (India). Funnily, sometimes few wise souls replying to the post try to convey to the post author that perhaps those posts might be more suitable for Twitter or Facebook, but that more often than not is akin to asking a lion to turn herbivorous.

I’d love to hear from the readers here on what they reckon is still good and what’s gone wrong with LinkedIn.

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Gursharan Singh
New Writers Welcome

Supply Chain Manager, Stock Trader (Indian markets), Certified Cricket Umpire, Dog Sitter & wannabe-Trainer, a bit of a gardener. I write on Life & People