The Unique Toxicity of LinkedIn

Some years ago, when I was living in Walpole, Massachusetts, a carnival came to town. My money disappeared quickly, but it was a nice night, so I walked around, ending up in the row of carnival games. Most of the games were $2. I lingered on one.

The attendant said something to beckon me over.

“I only have a dollar in my pocket,” I said.

“What are you doing walking around with a dollar?”

Having no answer, because the carnival had its own rules, I walked away. This story brings us to LinkedIn, another place with its own rules.

A lot of well-meaning, sincere people trying to be helpful tell job seekers to not just browse job listings on LinkedIn, but to “engage” there. I’m not even sure they’re wrong, but I am sure that LinkedIn is just as toxic as any other social network. The fact that it’s necessary makes it worse.

Engaging, of course, means writing posts, and liking and commenting on other people’s posts. That’s where the trouble lies.

A few months ago I saw a post praising a large streaming company for its approach to layoffs. My head spun, but at least that person had a point; getting a good severance when you’re laid off makes a major difference.

The post that really broke my brain was about a cat.

A poster’s niece asked the poster’s opinion on whether she should get a cat. The poster replied, “I don’t care.”

Of course, if anyone asks if they should adopt a cat, the answer is yes. There are lots of cats, and they need places to live. The only exception is when you have a concern, and in that case you raise it gently, like, “Are you sure a cat won’t interfere with your lifestyle?” The answer is never “I don’t care.”

I can’t explain the poster’s chilling apathy toward their niece (and cats), but I was fascinated that they wanted to post this on LinkedIn.

The poster may have brought this around to business, somehow, but the other thing I remember is that they described this as a gift. “I gave her the gift of no opinion.” This was the hook of the post, heartily approved by dozens of commenters.

My apathy is a gift. Gordon Gekko couldn’t have said it better.

Twitter (even pre-Musk Twitter) comes under the most criticism, because it is the most negative platform. Facebook can be negative as well, but Twitter’s openness and use of trending topics just makes it rocket fuel for pile-ons. But sometimes (again, pre-Musk Twitter) I found Twitter’s negativity refreshing. It was like a break room full of aspiring writers who hate their day jobs. Everyone learns, quickly, that Twitter doesn’t want to see photos of their trip to Aruba. Facebook wants those. Your complaint that you can’t afford to visit Aruba, however, would always find an audience on Twitter.

For a while, I thought LinkedIn needed a Twitter-like site to balance it the way Twitter (sort of) balances Facebook. No one liked this idea. The more I persisted, saying it could be a sort of electronic water cooler, the more resistance I got.

In retrospect this makes perfect sense. Who wants to post about work on two different platforms? But that leaves us with LinkedIn, and LinkedIn’s almost mandatory positivity is part of what makes it toxic.

In the last few years, I’ve tried to make LinkedIn more useful. For a while I wrote little essays about writing, and they were well-received but never popular enough to be moving any needles on my career. I occasionally comment on other people’s posts, but I’ve learned to be careful about that, because the human eye gravitates to the shorter comment, and you can throw water on someone’s effort without meaning to; I don’t want to do that.

Perhaps you’ve been lucky enough to work at a company that has offsites. Everyone scoots off to someplace scenic and has an all-day meeting with some breakout sessions about company issues. And if you survived the trust fall, perhaps you noticed the tone people use at these meetings.

“Speaking as a member of the Marketing team who also works in the Dallas field office with its largely Engineering staff on site, I would like to say that it would be great if we had cross-functional and cross-location teams that could better optimize our workflow to achieve our goals.”

In other words, they say nothing, but verbosely. And you can’t get mad at them, because they’re acutely aware that they are being watched. They don’t want to be the person you remember from the offsite.

Fine. But the idea of social media is that you have something to say, and you’re going online to say it. Except LinkedIn.

I considered comparing LinkedIn to a mall in which everyone is a store, but that’s not quite fair. It’s more like an industry conference, which draws three types of people: subject matter experts, people obligated to be there for work, and people there looking for work. On LinkedIn, of course, the latter group is the majority. (A lot of people on LinkedIn position themselves as subject matter experts, with wildly mixed results, but that might be a story for another day.)

By nature it’s performative, like all social media, but it’s performative within that limited, offsite tone. It’s not healthy for people to talk like that all the time.

And hence we get stuff like “the gift of no opinion.”

We also get a fair amount of fiction. I know it’s time to log off when I start wanting to reply “Yeah, that didn’t happen.” Recently a COO recounted a long story his Uber driver told him. I think the post is partially true; he heard the story, he took an Uber, maybe he heard the story from his friend who’s an Uber driver, whatever; it’s just not true as he told it, because it played like a scene from a movie.

There are quite a few “strawman” posts, along the lines of “Most people are using ChatGPT wrong!” Putting aside the question of how they know, one is left to question why they care, and the answer just becomes, they want you to know they know.

Work is the fundamental fact, and fundamental problem, in most of my work. I think it might be the defining fact of American life, and that’s why we ask new people where they work. We’re looking to understand their experience. LinkedIn offers people a chance to define their work experience (in the same way Facebook allows people to define their lives a certain way), but I want either the truth or (if it must be a funhouse mirror) a funhouse mirror designed to entertain me. I don’t want someone trying to sell me something.

Am I going to quit LinkedIn? No, I stay there out of necessity. I just wish it was better, more real. And I don’t mind visiting a carnival from time to time, but I’d rather it wasn’t run by Cooger and Dark.