This is How LinkedIn Content Works

The skip-ad button on YouTube is about the only thing I tap faster than the log-out button on LinkedIn. No platform seems to sap my life-force quite as quickly - and I have a Twitter account. And what is it that seemingly gets up my nose more than unfettered hate speech?

Content.

We've all seen Content. We've all done Content.

Despite whatever it is we're meant to be doing during our working day, Content Creation is finding its way to the forefront of most professional's agendas as a means to coax interest and forge exposure online. You're not allowed to simply be online anymore - gone are the days of turning up and making your point to the world of your own rational initiative. Now we need to appease feed algorithms that champion only the most vocal of the vocal majority, favouring their high posting frequency and reaction volumes. Only those with the mettle to remain "present" earn their freedom past the mesh of limited reach, erected by the unseen digital judging panel.

The problem is one's obsequious need to post Content online rapidly exceeds the amount of decent ideas one has, which is a particular blight of professional accounts feeling pressured to dump out posts that are utterly starved of relevance or value.

I can forgive Jane down the road sharing her spontaneous, unabashedly amateur TikTok dance in her back garden with her bewildered dogs darting back and forth, or a Facebook post from my uncle Len, understandably impressed with the attractive meal he's about to consume in a fancy Portuguese restaurant, because Jane and Len aren't hoping to sell me anything in the long run. Jane and Len are just having a marvellous time.
But when, say, a design consultant shares the sunny view from their desk at the start of the day, it's not their private Facebook community who are subjected to it (or maybe it is, too); the image is foisted upon their peers and colleagues and idols as LinkedIn Content, with a narrative deftly weaved into the caption about being a successful, go-getting, well-functioning member of the business landscape.
The image might be aesthetically pleasing but that's only marginal in the motive for posting it. The underlying agenda of this post - along with tomorrow's about the cost of the lunch purchased, the controversial conversation overheard on the train, the early jog before breakfast - is to game robots into amplifying one's name, in the pursuit of opportunity.
We all know this, we all do this.

Quite why this objective has convinced the entire LinkedIn user-base to communicate as though they're either a PowerPoint presentation incarnate, or they're debriefing their social circle over coffee is beyond me, but it falls far short of what I login to the platform for. I login to LinkedIn to be impressed; to celebrate the accomplishments of my friends and peers, and to learn of their wants and successes. I don't login to drown in colloquial sludge and impossibly contorted anecdotes intended to demonstrate character, nor do I login to conciliate those whose sole use of the platform is to preen their personal brand of soapbox, confusing professionalism with narcissism. Prattling on about their industries and key insights towards lucrative success, which most definitely aren't thinly veiling ads for their own services.

Prospective job discussion shouldn't be so aggressive or tedious or enshrouded. I mean, what is wrong with simply typing "hire me now for xyz"? Why can nobody seem to make that request without first wrapping it up in a condescending barrage of tripe or a photo of their cat? The unnatural manner in which people conduct themselves on LinkedIn is frankly preposterous. At least when users fish for engagement on other social media platforms they do so with Content that's marginally entertaining. LinkedIn Content seeks to answer questions no one is asking and that'll remain totally negligible to the Creator so long as the robots shepherding it around don't develop attention spans, a critical eye for art, or a thirst for genuine knowledge.

I write this piece cynically to the point of being offensive, as my thumb races over the latest malnourished LinkedIn tumultuousness. I write it knowing full well you too will have at some point swiped enthusiastically past Content I've vomited onto these treadmills.

Am I going to stop writing such Content? No, because being at the back of the pack is undesirable, humiliating even. Because if I am not speaking online I am not valuable online. Because this is what we are all conditioned to do now, isn't it - asserting our significance by way of bloating servers with low value brain burps. Bending to rather than breaking through the technological filter between basic human interaction.
This is how Content works.