I have a love/hate relationship with LinkedIn. It is full of useless noise, but it’s a great way to keep up with colleagues and interesting people working in my field. Here are two major frustrations with the platform that diminish its utility to me.

• Like most social media, the signal-to-noise ratio on LinkedIn is quite low. Most posts are either self-congratulatory, AI slop, or simply some variation of an existing Business Meme (“I replaced an entire team of developers with AI!” “SaaS is dead!” etc). I wish I could filter my feed down to a subset of users that I find actually informative. For example, Shreyas Doshi either writes or shares excellent content around product management. Ed Melendez constantly posts a highly eclectic variety of things I find interesting. I can follow both of these people, but since the Feed is algorithmic, I might not see anything they post for days or weeks and it will be surrounded by useless slop. There’s no way to build an RSS feed for an individual’s LinkedIn activity, so I am simply at the mercy of the almighty algorithm as to when or where I might see these posts. It probably doesn’t help that as a long-time LinkedIn user I’m connected to thousands of users, making my Feed particularly noisy.
• Let’s say I do see something interesting in my Feed and I leave the post for another page. When I return to the feed (via a browser “Back” button) everything in my Feed is reshuffled and the original item is lost in the abyss. This is particularly frustrating on a mobile device where I might be scrolling through the Feed, be interrupted by an email or something. When I return to the Feed, the page automatically reloads, losing everything I was looking at and giving me a whole new set of slop to scroll through.

All in all, I still find LinkedIn useful enough that I continue to visit it on a fairly regular basis (while successfully ignoring most of the notifications).

I still consume most of my content via old-school RSS (via Feedly) and wish that LinkedIn would make it easier for users to publish content to publicly accessible feeds. It makes sense that they would want a walled garden with algorithm-driven content (I assume “time on site” is some Director’s KPI) but this approach continues to diminish the utility of any content posted on LinkedIn.

Due to this conflict of incentives, my approach is to post (most) everything I write both on LinkedIn and on my blog.

Photo by Karsten Winegeart on Unsplash