It’s probably a net good thing that there are social media sites for people of various proclivities and needs. There’s Snapchat for mean younger millennials, BlueSky for elder millennial furries, TikTik for overwhelmed Gen Zers, and Facebook for Boomers who wish their elder millennial furry kids would still talk to them. And then there’s LinkedIn.
How best to describe LinkedIn? I think part of the genius of the site is that it’s not just a place to list jobs. It’s a professional social media platform. A deeply strange one. I once knew a therapist who’d just moved from NYC to LA, and I asked what the difference was between the two places, based solely on her patients.
“In New York, everyone tries to convince you their life is worse than it is,” she explained.” In Los Angeles, it’s exactly the opposite.”
LinkedIn culture is sort of like LA culture, but an even more erstatz and AI-inflected version. It’s one of those places where they film when it’s too expensive to film in LA, but it needs to look like LA. I guess this means that LinkedIn is the Vancouver of social media?
I say all this because I had a strange interaction this week with the platform based on a post I wrote on The Autopian. It was about how Nissan’s new CEO, a guy named Ivan Espinosa, is in an unofficial Nissan house band called Tempura Crime Scene. I was delighted by this post and challenged the band to play the New York Auto Show.
While I don’t usually share posts on LinkedIn, I did share this one, mostly because I wanted to see if I could convince someone at Nissan to make it happen. As hoped, Nissan USA’s Director of Corporate Comms responded positively.
So you’re saying there’s a chance…
If that was the only interaction I’d had, it would be fine. But then I logged in and noticed someone shared the post, and even did so in a flattering-sounding way. Here’s what I first saw when I was tagged:
From Drumbeats to Driving Innovation @ Nissan Motor Corporation
Sharing a fantastic article by Matt Hardigree at The Autopian about Nissan’s new CEO, Ivan Espinosa — who also happens to be the drummer for the band Tempura Crime Scene.
Oh, cool, I thought. I wandered over to the post to see the full thing.
At first glance, it might seem like just a fun side note. But being a drummer is more than keeping time — it’s about:
Leadership through rhythm – the drummer sets the pace and keeps the group in sync, just as a CEO drives alignment across a global organization.
Listening & collaboration – great drummers know when to push forward and when to support, much like guiding a team through market challenges and opportunities.
Energy & creativity – the heartbeat of the music mirrors the passion and innovation required to inspire a company’s culture and customers.
Oh, no…
You can click the link above to read the full thing.
LinkedIn is full of this sort of exec-speak, Brene Brownnoser kinda content. I cannot say with 100% certainty that this post was written by AI, but it follows an extremely popular format that AI loves. You’ve probably seen it if you’ve been on Linkedin before. It provides four bullet points and ends with two emojis.
This post feels like it was either written by AI, or it was written to ape a style that AI learned by reading too many LinkedIn posts in some sort of degenerative rhetorical spiral. The “author” of this post appears to be a part-time social media consultant named Stephen C. Holtzman, whose day job is doing social media work for a few Toyota and Mitsubishi dealers, as well as some other local businesses in Canada, according to his profile.
He’s somehow amassed over 30,000 followers on LinkedIn with this schtick, so fair play. His post got more engagement than my post, and I wrote the original article. It seems like a lot of big deal PR and Comms people follow him.
Did I follow him? I do now. LinkedIn may be a Potemkin version of the real professional world, but there are advantages to being prominent there. I suppose the easiest way to thrive in an uncanny valley is to be equally uncanny.
Also, he linked to the full article, which I always appreciate.
Top graphic images: LinkedIn
LinkedIn is funny because it has its own trademark format.
It’s not just for talking about professional opportunities.
For some reason, each paragraph can only have one sentence.
Maybe two, max.
Does this make your anecdotes seem more profound?
It just did.
Is content farming on LinkedIn like being a real farmer in the Sahara?
I know it’s only tangentially related, but I still can never get over the fact that they were somehow able to make Vancouver look like ****ing Santa Barbara for Psych
Yeah, I remember being impressed they had the budget to shoot in California, then even more impressed when I realized they did not.
I was on LinkedIn a bunch 12 years ago when I was job hunting (and it worked, a contact who saw my update reached out and led to my current position), but I basically haven’t been back. For a while I would actually respond to recruiters because I was scarred from unemployment and wanted to keep a fallback plan open, but it’s been long enough now that I don’t bother. Sounds like I’m not missing much.
Anyone who regularly posts on linkedIn outside of job hunting is suspicious as fuck.
And also it’s the social site most likely to get you into trouble with your employer, which probably explains why 90% of posts are from self-employed consultants, coaches, and people from private/family companies who can say what they want.
I’m terrified of even liking something that could be perceived as controversial.
But I do like it for “People I know professionally but we’re not close enough to use personal emails.” I’ve thanked managers and recruiters for their time, reached out about jobs, etc. But using it as a social media platform seems crazy unless you’re one of those people above.
Thanks for the reminder that I need to close my Linkedin account…
LinkedIN is where dreams go to die.
Facebook is for narcissists, Linked-in is for sycophants.
“Congratulations in your new role Jessica” the one that stole from me
“Kudos Matt” I know your dad works for the company
Things that I always wanted to say there but its not a safe space lol
“When AI was first able to talk like a LinkedIn poster, people erroneously came to the conclusion that this meant AI had a soul, rather than the more obvious conclusion that LinkedIn posters do not.”
LinkedIn? The repository of ‘hey, look at me, I’m more successful than you’ boasting, intermingled amongst what, +80% bogus open job offerings? Why bother, the toxicity level is approaching Twitter.
It’s the place for d*ck measuring, especially popular with millennials (I am one).
I happen to follow a person on LinkedIn “Adam Bernard”. He was a long time GM competitive analysis person (as in, he essentially ran the comp analysis dept at GM). He seems to be an avid Autopian reader as he posts links to articles here a lot and agrees with them (as he should!). He has some good insight to the general auto industry. He is one of the very few people I follow on any social media. Just thought I would share that!
This is the excellent writing I am here for. I recently had to attend a training that was full of this sort of stuff, and I was sort of making a game of guessing which bits were Stephen Covey, Brene Brown, etc…but even the most corpo of seminars can’t hold a candle to LinkedIn.
And there’s a significant movement of people who post satire to it in the same style…it’s not always easy to tell which is which.
Sorry this all just reminded me of this great Ronny Chieng comedy bit from a few years ago. Instagram
The enshittification of LinkedIn is as bad as any social media platform, if not worse.
I love this bit. Also the one where he says that years from now, people will be amazed that we let just anyone on the internet. Children. Pregnant people.
LinkedIn is the only social media I have, and these days I wish I didn’t have it, except that I need it for keeping up with recruiters and job postings that I want to stay informed about but don’t want them to blow up my email and phone. Between the MBA buzzword-speak, AI slop, and almost-business-related political posts, going on there is a dystopian nightmare.
Social media is evil.
(Yes, I understand the irony of posting here.)
I like to think of The Autopian like I do select automotive forums, as, to borrow some of that MBA-speak, a “digital community”. Granted, it is splitting hairs, but if this place ever even approaches the levels of junk that LinkedIn or Facebook has, I suspect most of the folks here today will have long-since left.
“There’s Snapchat for mean younger millennials, BlueSky for elder millennial furries, TikTik for overwhelmed Gen Zers, and Facebook for Boomers who wish their elder millennial furry kids would still talk to them.”
Very on-brand for Gen-X to be forgotten off this list.
We all just said “fuck it” when MySpace folded.
Tom just wanted a friend.
Tom was my first friend. Looks over shoulder at you
Gen X is on Facebook, but not active.
What is the Gen X social media platform?
Chiming in on all of them to bemoan the lack of inclusion in lists like this.
I feel seen.
As a Gen-Xer this is uncomfortable and weird.
I would think that as a sasquatch it would be uncomfortable and weird.
As a fellow Gen-Xer I agree that this is uncomfortable and weird. There is a reason I don’t use social media, which is I hate the “list” posts… I’m forced to use LinkedIn by my workplace, otherwise I’d be an social media ghost like three of my same age friends.
I’m not sure Gen-X wants to be included in this, Drew, we just want to be left alone to listen to our Alt and NeuMetal channels on Spotify and Apple Music.
Or completely ignoring it.
As one of our patron saints once put it “well, whatever, never mind.”
If I’m anything to go by, a few niche forums and maybe closed Telegram or Signal groups of people who already know each other.
Communicating through Facebook Marketplace listings
And as the walking, talking personification of Gen X, that’s just the way I like it.
Matt didn’t forget us, there is no social network for us. Not that we care, which would also be on-brand if we cared about brands.
It’s Facebook-for-Work. Let’s me
stalkconnect with formerfriendscolleagues, and I can see theirrelationshipscurrent job and title.And reaching out to recruiters to see what else is on the market.
But, what strikes me the most, is the sheer amount of toxic comments relating to politics in there is obscene.
I learned long ago to never read comments on any site for this reason. The only exception is the Autopian.
It’s foe salespeople, recruiters, and other sociopaths. Everyone else just steers clear.
I keep a LinkedIn exclusively for whatever future time I will need to job hunt again. In the meantime, I avoid it if at all possible for this very reason. Posting on LinkedIn is only for the career-obsessed and/or the deranged.
I’m fortunate enough that I can find all my job hunt needs on the normal job posting sites.
Hell, I just got an Indeed e-mail today from a shop 5mins from my house. $50-60/hr. I don’t want to start wrenching again if I can avoid it, but good to know there’s backups ready to go.
Man, wrenching on cars pays WAY better than wrenching on bicycles!
Nope. But wrenching on commercial diesel trucks and buses does! I’ve been in Truck & Coach my entire career. Cars are just my hobby.
I don’t have any other social media – I keep a sterile LinkedIn (no posts, no contacts, just a resume) because HR departments get paranoid if they can’t find anything on you.
Thinking HR departments need to begin understanding some people want no aspect of time-wasting social media in their lives. For that, they must look at it as a plus; you’re not wasting time on your phone and you’re more job focused.
In my experience, HR is usually staffed by gossips and busy-bodies who don’t have any other marketable skills. Saying “I don’t have social media” these days sounds strange and weird, it leaves a hole of uncertainty for the hiring manager and HR – they have gotten addicted to being able to stalk employees (or use services that do that for then and collate social media posts). Taking away that insight makes them uncomfortable and it can affect the chance of getting hired; so I give them a nice professional online presence they can “find” to make themselves feel better.
This is why no one can get a good picture of Big Foot. Sasquatches have no social media presence.
I had a linkedin profile back when I was looking for jobs like 10 years ago, but the shit that gets posted on there is so….cringe? I think that’s what the kids call it these days. I can’t deal. Like why use your work persona outside of work? Aren’t you people real???
Every post I’ve ever seen from LinkedIn has just convinced me I never want to have a presence on LinkedIn.
It feels like they took the Book of Faces and somehow descended it to a deeper level of Hell. If it weren’t for the absolute Crack that is FB Marketplace, I’d toss the whole platform into the Fires of Mordor.
LinkedIn just seems like something that exists so MBAs can break their arms jerking themselves off.
Honestly, solid take.
That is the best description of LinkedIn I’ve ever heard.
Nothing much else needs to be said.