On LinkedIn, We Are All Required to Be Annoying

I forget how or when it started, you know? That exact moment in the timeline when LinkedIn became the sum of all the worst parts of Facebook. See, I joined LinkedIn a few years ago just because I felt like I had to. It made me feel like an adult somehow. Fresh out of college, I had to have a LinkedIn account to commemorate my entrance into the adult professional sphere. Your friends were on it and so were your professors and your personal heroes in the industry. It was a place to connect, where you'd find pocket opportunities for jobs, freelancing gigs, or practical advice. You were a very real, very serious person if you were on here.

But six years of Linkedin participation later, it just feels like the 12th circle of social hell, like being alone with your in-laws in the living room while waiting for your partner to come home. Less hot, has air conditioning, just needlessly insufferable.

God, the clutter. I don't remember it being this obnoxious when it started out. We can take a little repugnance on social media here or there. Too much of it and our lips and eyes visibly recoil in disgust. Just recently, I just read another of those "our star employee wanted to leave" posts. The story ended with them, you guessed it, giving the employee less workload. It's the same format for these things on the app anyway. Exhibit A: an employee gets burned out because of overwork and underpay, they want to go, and then someone from human resources, or maybe even the founder, suddenly feels bad. Said HR personnel or founder posts about it on their feed, and now they have themselves a trendy post with a quote from the wrong person. Christ, startup founders and their startup speak.

I'm no business guy, but I know enough. I'd like to think that the solution just feels so easy: hire more people and pay them more. It just seems so simple. Maybe it's supposed to be some form of repentance. Oh God, I dehumanized my people. Now, I must treat them like people again. My followers are going to love this. Perhaps this is just some naivete on my part. Higher-ups, after all, create their own language. This language is only for them and not for the employees down the line. It's like they're speaking in Latin and the only people who have the divine right to understand them are the kings: them, their co-bosses, and middle-management suck-ups as many as the LinkedIn tab can accommodate.

And then we have those way-too-old memes that belong in 2012. 9Gag called, it wants its lousy jokes back. If not this, we have a story about someone bumping into a candidate and them being an asshole. How new. Or an exchange with a "self-made" guy who wakes up at 4 a.m., got some avocado toast, and became a millionaire just like that, forgetting about the part his mom embezzled their company's funds. Or another story about being considerate to a worker whose productivity is down because their mother died. Wow, congratulations! You've done an empathy. My favorite is the dude who posts about his success and all the imaginary haters. They see him rolling. They be imaginary hatin'.

LinkedIn is what Facebook was 13 years ago. The site is way too spammy and the experience is just okay. Random, sometimes creepy, profile views and requests from elsewhere. Themed statuses. A few real friends. The most significant difference here is the prevalence of entitled rich kids who haven't done jackshit, nepotism hires flexing, recruiters lying through their teeth, and LinkedIn influencers influencing. Go into their profiles and their backgrounds are just bloated anyway.

It's not all bad, I know. LinkedIn says that its platform helps three people get hired every minute. Good for them.

Photo by Pexels.

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And then there's me, posting some stories I wrote, too. I have my corny labels and I have my name. Just as annoying. I am no better than anyone on this platform. We all have to put ourselves out there, I suppose. I hate myself for participating in this cheap professional networking scheme. But I guess I'm condemned to it, like the myriad other things I do but do not want to because of social pressure. But really, we shouldn't need to have a LinkedIn profile to legitimize our competence in the first place. Those connections just seem like strangers following you on Instagram who view your stories and never talk to you. Referrals still do much better than the average LinkedIn connection.

LinkedIn sort of feels like it has lost its purpose over the years. Or maybe I'm just sobering up to the reality of the whole "game" here. Everything feels so curated in the most LinkedIn-ly way imaginable. How people dress, speak, and act. Even if most are snobs and incompetent knobs in real life. I know it's no different from any other work environment.

It's not like LinkedIn differs much from any social media app or office space. It has the personality, the bargaining, the quirks, the good, the bad, and the really bad. But I feel like we've saturated it to a point where it defeats its original vision. It has gotten so unpleasant that any form of professionalism is diluted by 700 million users trying to sound more like another key in the cog. Another soldier in the capitalist infantry, if you will. And the sounds of their marching are just too fucking loud.

And now for the part where I go preachy about how to not be annoying on LinkedIn. The secret is: we just can't. This is a platform that was doomed to be annoying from the start. The endgame here is for all of us to be annoying. It's one gigantic online resume that values fake optimism, fraudulent profiling, and surface-level professional discourse. We gobble it up.

What it will always be is a career builder that has its limitations. There's a point in our careers where we transcend these and foster real relationships. There will also be a point where we must have much better discussions about employment. There will be another point where we're going to realize how silly and synthetic the sense of community here is.

That, however, doesn't mean we can't make LinkedIn a little better. I've heard a lot of feel-good stories from here, which is always nice. We have our portfolios up for our selected community to dissect. The Recommendations isn't too bad of a feature either. Some contacts and circles do matter and some deals are forged here and there. Hell, people are meeting their partners here, as well (any app can be a dating app if you're brave enough). I, too, understand that we have to make work more fun, accessible, and even kinder for morale. Hence, the memes and insights.

But maybe don't be as obnoxious as that loudmouth tech entrepreneur who made his money from daddy's subsidiaries. Maybe fact-check your data or that quote you want to use. Maybe we can aspire to be something more than just another unbothered influencer white guy. Maybe try to build more meaningful professional partnerships. Or maybe, just maybe, we can stop biting on the teat of the LinkedIn milk machine this hard.