I deleted my LinkedIn account. Not deactivated, not taking a break. Deleted. And honestly, it felt like finally unsubscribing from a newsletter I should have binned years ago.
LinkedIn has become an echo chamber of the worst kind. It’s not even a useful echo chamber where you might accidentally learn something. It’s a place where people post the same recycled motivational platitudes, agree with each other in the comments, and pat themselves on the back for being brave enough to share their hot take that nobody should work weekends (revolutionary stuff, truly).
The algorithm rewards engagement bait, so that’s all you see. Someone got fired and now they’re grateful for the journey. Someone else turned down a million dollars because company culture matters more than money (sure you did, mate). It’s exhausting.
The content quality has cratered so badly that half my feed was recycled Reddit memes. Not even good Reddit memes. We’re talking screenshots from r/ProgrammerHumor that were already stale three years ago, now being reposted by tech influencers with captions like “This is so true! Who else feels this way?”
The same tired jokes about meetings that could have been emails, the same stock photos of people pretending to collaborate, the same motivational quotes superimposed on sunsets. LinkedIn has become the place where internet content goes to die, stripped of context and repackaged for engagement by people who think they’re being relatable.
At least on Reddit, the memes are current. On LinkedIn, you’re watching someone’s dad discover the internet in real time.
Here’s the thing that surprised me: LinkedIn is worse than TikTok. I know that sounds absurd. TikTok is supposedly the doomscrolling app that’s rotting everyone’s brains with short-form video content. YouTube Shorts isn’t much better.
But at least those platforms are honest about what they are. They’re entertainment. They’re designed to waste your time and they do it efficiently.
LinkedIn pretends to be something productive. It wears a suit and calls itself professional networking while serving you the exact same dopamine hits as any other social media platform. The difference is that after an hour on TikTok, you know you’ve been procrastinating. After an hour on LinkedIn, you’ve convinced yourself you were being productive because you read a post about leadership.
You weren’t. You were doomscrolling in business casual.
I’ve never found a job through LinkedIn. Not once. Every role I’ve landed has come through actual human connections. A former colleague, a friend of a friend, someone I met at a conference, a client who remembered my work.
The Australian tech scene is small enough that reputation does the heavy lifting. LinkedIn’s promise of professional networking is a fantasy for most people. It’s a database where recruiters store your details and occasionally spray you with irrelevant messages.
Speaking of recruiters, they’ve turned LinkedIn into their personal telemarketing platform. My inbox was a graveyard of copy-paste messages from people who clearly hadn’t read my profile. “I came across your impressive background and thought you’d be perfect for this exciting opportunity in a completely unrelated field on the other side of the world for half your current salary.”
They’re like real estate agents who send you listings for properties in suburbs you’ve never heard of, in price ranges that make no sense, addressed to the wrong name. Persistent, impersonal, and impossible to escape.
You can’t even be rude to them because everything is attached to your professional identity. At least with telemarketing calls you can hang up. On LinkedIn, you have to craft a polite rejection that won’t damage your reputation, which takes more mental energy than just ignoring them, which means they pile up in your inbox as a constant source of low-grade guilt.
But the thing that really made me quit was the performative nonsense. LinkedIn has become a stage for self-flagellation disguised as humility. People posting about their failures with a knowing wink, fishing for validation.
“I got rejected from 47 companies before landing my dream job at FAANG. Never give up.” Cool story, but why does it need to be broadcast to ten thousand connections? It’s not inspiring. It’s theatre.
The whole platform has become a competition to see who can be the most vulnerably professional, who can turn their struggles into content most effectively, who can extract the most engagement from their personal life while maintaining plausible deniability that they’re not just doing it for the likes.
The culture on LinkedIn has turned genuinely toxic, but it’s a specific flavour of toxic that’s hard to call out because it’s wrapped in positivity. It’s toxic positivity taken to its logical extreme.
Nobody can just share news anymore. Everything has to be a lesson. Got promoted? Here’s what I learned. Got laid off? Here’s what I learned. Had a bad meeting? Here’s what I learned.
The relentless insistence on extracting growth from every experience is exhausting to witness. Sometimes bad things happen and there’s no lesson. Sometimes you just had a rough week and you don’t need to monetise it for your personal brand.
Then there’s the virtue signalling. Every time something happens in the world, LinkedIn transforms into a parade of profile picture frames and hollow statements. Companies posting about their commitment to causes they’ll forget about in a week. Individuals sharing articles they haven’t read with captions like “This is important” or “We need to do better.”
Nobody is doing better. They’re just performing caring for an audience of other performers. It’s social media at its most cynical.
The performative allyship is constant, and calling it out makes you look like the bad guy because who could possibly be against caring about important issues? The answer is nobody, but there’s a difference between caring and performing caring for professional clout, and LinkedIn has made that distinction almost impossible to draw.
The platform rewards the wrong behaviours. The people who succeed on LinkedIn aren’t necessarily good at their jobs. They’re good at LinkedIn. They know how to game the algorithm, how to phrase a post for maximum engagement, how to turn a mundane observation into a viral moment.
Actual expertise is secondary to personal branding. I don’t want to play that game, and I don’t want to watch other people play it.
The people with genuinely interesting things to say are drowned out by the content machines, the thought leaders, the professional LinkedIn posters who treat the platform like a full-time job. And maybe for some of them it is. Good for them. But that’s not the professional network I signed up for fifteen years ago.
The comments sections are their own special kind of nightmare. Every post is met with the same performative agreement. “Great insights!” “So true!” “This resonates!” “Couldn’t agree more!”
It’s an endless loop of people validating each other, not because they genuinely agree but because commenting boosts their own visibility. Disagreement is almost non-existent because LinkedIn has trained everyone that conflict is bad for your personal brand.
So you get this homogeneous soup of positive reinforcement where nobody says anything real because the social cost of honesty is too high. At least on Twitter people would tell you when you were wrong. On LinkedIn, they’ll like your post and then talk about how stupid it was in private.
What I’ve discovered since leaving is that I don’t miss it at all. I’m not less connected to my industry. I still hear about opportunities through the channels that actually work. My inbox is quieter. I have more time to do actual work instead of scrolling through an endless feed of humble brags and recruitment spam.
The anxiety of feeling like I needed to post, needed to engage, needed to maintain my professional presence, just evaporated. It wasn’t serving me. It was extracting attention from me and giving back nothing of value.
If you’re on LinkedIn and it genuinely helps you, that’s fine. But if you’re staying because you feel like you have to, because everyone else is there, because you might miss something, I can tell you from the other side that you won’t.
The professional world existed before LinkedIn and it’ll keep existing after you leave. You’re allowed to opt out. Your career won’t collapse. Your network won’t forget you exist. You’ll just have more time and less exposure to recycled memes and recruitment spam. That’s a pretty good trade.