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LinkedIn Will Never Die
The Social Media Platform that Will Outlast Them All
Is social media in decline?
A few weeks ago Twitter founder Jack Dorsey announced he is stepping down after 16 years as CEO. Dorsey will be replaced by chief technology officer (CTO) Parag Agrawal.
A few weeks before Dorsey's announcement, Mark Zuckerberg switched from focusing on Facebook to Virtual Reality and building the Metaverse.
After 15 years, both of these founders are moving on to new things. Does this mean Facebook and Twitter are in decline? Maybe, maybe not. I think we forget how quickly everyone can leave these social media platforms. My guess is that Facebook is terrified of this (and Twitter, of course) - they could lose a billion users in a month; the flip side of fast growth is fast de-growth. In the U.S., the average Facebook user in the U.S. was 40.5 years old.
I've been taking a break from social media. For the past month I decided to cut down my use by 50%. Walking away seems insane and impossible—until you do it. Then you wonder why you stayed on for so long. logging off has a real effect on well-being, we can see some of them, other effects we can't see.
Many of us think of social media as a glass of wine—a harmless indulgence at low levels of use, and a total blast on a special occasion. I used to think this, too, but I now think it is more like the modern cigarette: saturated with highly addictive chemicals, with only the most surface-level social benefits, and with a near-guarantee that a significant number of users will receive long-term damage.
Infinite Scrolling
The first thing you realize is that infinite scrolling does weird things to your brain. I spent more time on forums and my computer experience was calmer. I forgot how calm computing was before the advent of the social media era of the mid to late 00s.
There is something different about browsing a page full of posts versus being on platforms that incite me to scroll down a feed of algorithmically curated news or updates. I find this to be the primary mechanism by which these platforms try to suck people into their content machine.
The Discourse
The second thing you notice is that over 90% of the "discourse" on Twitter has no connection to real life. It exists only in the feedback loop of the ecosystem. You go outside and everything is fine.
With that being said, Social media does provide novelty in an age of stuck culture. I know what I'm going to get when I go to the cinema, listen to the radio or open Netflix. The top 12 biggest grossing films of the past year are all sequels. this isn't just something that movie studios are doing. It's something that audiences are choosing. Almost all of the top movies this year are franchise installments.
As Simon Dedeo wrote:
"In previous iterations of culture, the artists, writers, and intellectuals of the world expected to be under the radar. Everything from Bebop to zine culture was, if not confrontational, esoteric, or at arm’s-length from received perception, at least anti-corporate by design. The idea that you’d take your work “to the big time” was (to use the modern vernacular) a cancellable offense. Virginia Woolf might have obsessed about her social life, but she did not struggle with a desire to go viral to the people of London.
Systems like Facebook and Twitter leveraged cyberpunk culture to convince the world that they, too, were punk rock. The problem, according to the large-scale social media systems, was always The Man—the gatekeeper, the editor, the institution—and they were there to rescue you. You could use them as blank canvases, to speak directly to the people who would speak back to you. We’d move fast and break things.
That’s because fame, not creation, or learning, has always been the primary function of social media.
There is one social media platform which does not seem to have this problem, LinkedIn. There's a few reasons for why I think LinkedIn will outlast Facebook and Twitter.
The Boss in the Elevator
A while back, when I was working in New York I was in the office. I was getting in the elevator to go home around 7:00 PM, which is later than I would've liked. A few other people boarded the elevator too, and we exchanged knowing nods and grumbled about late nights, the excessive workload, and bad weather. The next floor, our CEO got on. Everyone's attitude shifted 180 degrees. We all had smiling, perky, and enthusiastic. I don't subscribe to the deification of our executives, but in that moment, I certainly acted like I did.
Everyone posts on LinkedIn like their current or next CEO is reading it. Profiles on LinkedIn have more real information on them then any other platform, meaning that what you say might have real consequences to you. Basically saying anything negative or critical might be used against you in the future of your career
1) Your Real Identity is Tied to Your Job on LinkedIn
It took about a decade for people to learn that expressing yourself candidly online must be done anonymously or in a private space, or there will be negative consequences. I predict your real identity online will be exclusively tied to your job or career prospects. And currently, there is only one social media company that holds that monopoly and it's LinkedIn. Crucially, every corporation is on their. And unlike younger demographics, corporations do not platform switch very easily.
While real identity is at one place there will be many different types of platforms where separate "anon" social media will emerge for people to post their true thoughts and opinions. Currently it's Twitter or a few others. But it doesn't have to be Twitter. There is no anchor to Twitter, like how corporations anchor LinkedIn. A switch can occur.
2) Fakery is a Sign of Social Intelligence
Personally, I find my personal LinkedIn newsfeed to be extremely unpleasant - and more or less useless - to read. But when push comes to shove, the next time I'm around the CEO, I know I'll have the same fake enthusiasm.
LinkedIn is bad for the same reason corporate music is bad, it can't have anything meaningful or it wouldn't be work friendly. The message is "I'm employable, I signal the current corporate virtues, look at what all I'm learning"
This is also a sign of social intelligence.
Most people understand, mostly unconsciously, that being "fake" (i.e., complimenting others for insignificant achievements and sharing fake stories) has become the most rewarding strategy to be successful in the westernized culture. LinkedIn actively contributes to this by hiding most of the negative cues that could let someone assess her/his own performance objectively.
Being "true" on LinkedIn is committing social suicide in my opinion. And everyone knows it.
The famous French Philosopher Jean De La Bruyere famously wrote about the Courtier. A man who lived and worked in the Royal court, and did what he needed to do to rise through the ranks. This description could fit what LinkedIn or any modern work place resembles:
3) Marketing
One of the reasons linkedIn feels so unbearably cringe is because of the shameless level of self promotion. It is explicit. People are hustling for new jobs or other people to notice them. The promotion is explicit. You’re always selling something. Either yourself, your company/product or something else. Usually that means offering something that makes you look smart or empathetic to stay active in your extended network.
When you look critically at any social network you'll find people trying to sell you something. The marketing and self-promotion is not so explicit. But it is there. Twitter doesn't feel like a market, it feels like hanging out at a cafe. But people are definitely selling you things on there. LinkedIn content is just more narrow and commercial, so that compounds the effect and makes it seem more pronounced.
There’s a similar network effect problem with Facebook, but it’s a lot easier to leave Facebook because you presumably can still message your real life friends in other ways. With LinkedIn you can’t leave without also seriously hurting your ability to get in touch with recruiters.
You don't need your car until you need your car - i.e. you aren't driving to pick up groceries 16 hours a day. That doesn't make your car valueless.
Likewise, Linkedin isn't needed the majority of the time, until you need it - i.e. you're faced with having to find a new job in an industry where the right referral can translate directly into a job with higher income.
That's not valueless.
Built on Fear
The corporate work culture survives on people's fears. If you don't play by the rules of the people in power, how will you make money, how will you feed your family, how will you contribute to society?
When people long for the days of the early web, the glorious idiosyncracies of personal sites and forums, they are really longing for a time and a space where people were free to communicate their own values. Now that space is owned and rented to the highest bidder. A site like LinkedIn wraps you up into a tiny, uniform package, sets you in an enormous data warehouse next to millions of other tiny people just like you, and sells the lot of you.
A lot of what he says resonates really strongly. Fact of the matter though is that we are locked in this state of affairs. Specially if you are in a not-exactly-buzzing job market. I don't know if there is a will and a way to revert ourselves back to something more than a commodity. And I don't see a way to move forward to something beyond that.
Job Search Refinement
To give one example, when applying to certain top companies, it is widely known that various text-analysis algorithms are used automatically to sift job applications. Here's how it works. Applicants start by composing perfectly sensible applications to email to prospective employers. But before they send them they type a series of adjectives — ‘Prize Winner… Olympic Medallist…’ at the bottom of their CV; then they change the font color of these words to white. This way, they are invisible to the human eye, but remain legible to the computer which is making the decision.
This kind of thing is nuts. But perhaps the consultancies are no less silly in pursuing such an approach to begin with. Because it rests on the assumption that the optimal way to build an elite organization is by assembling a homogeneous group of similarly elite, overeducated, hyper-competitive individuals.