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
Jim Farley should use it to recruit laid-off/bought out Toyota and Honda engineers.
Each of the Big 3 (and perhaps even the New Big 3 as well) should have someone whose full-time job it is to just go after people from Honda and Toyota. Add them to the company, and hire the ones who actually learned something there.
I go to LinkedIN because my company posts a lot of stuff on it. Most stories don’t impact me, but just in case, I’ll scan them.
What I find weird is the train wreck of non professional posts. I’ve seen people have a post about how they need a job and then…. Wow.
I mean, that post was correct about drummers (obviously), but Mr. Holtzman just couldn’t avoid descending into corporate garbage-speak.
Shut up, Steve.
By the way, I watched a little bit of that YouTube video of Tempura Crime Scene, and I sincerely hope Ivan’s business acumen is better than his drumming. If not, Nissan is doomed.
I use LinkedIn for unsolicited job opportunities so I know that my current salary is competitive and I have an escape hatch when a micro manager pisses me off. I even paid a guy $100 to SEO it for me and it has paid dividends.
Yo, hook me up with your guy.
LinkedIn’s value is about establishing connections and networking with people without needing to attend trade conferences and in person events. The feed is exclusively for show.
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.
Great insight, Disphenoidal.
Writing like this makes people…
…click see more, which bumps up your engagement rate
As do any comments you provoke by saying something inaccurate
Like Berlin is in Scotland
So the algo broadcasts you to more people
Even if it’s really annoying
Agree?
Haiku are easy.
But they don’t always make sense.
Refrigerator.
This needs way more stars
Calculate alligator
I love your Haiku
🙂
I love shower spaghetti.
Rusty parts dishwashers are great.
Chainsaw to cut batteries.
HATE.
THIS.
Don’t forget a completely pointless but flattering selfie if you’re a female below 40 years old.
Does anyone actually read through those posts?
They cause my eyes to instantly glaze over.
As for the emojis, pass the bucket.
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
My favourite was when LinkedIn automation posted a “today is x’s 5th anniversary at company y.” when x died of cancer a few years ago (RIP Sarah) but their account is kept alive by her estate for legitimate reasons. Some rando connection replied “amazing, Sarah, I hope you celebrate the occasion!”
…
“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.
Just realized this show was from last year, not “years ago”, but also last year is years ago.
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.
I don’t consider the Autopian and similar places as social media; or at the least, they’re specific type of social media. The focus is on articles written by professional writers, and there just happens to be comments. It’s not like just anyone can submit an Autopian post, so there is that filter compared to the rest.
OHHHH, here I was thinking it was just SoCal media that was evil. At least according to the POTUS.
Right there with you. Been off the other social medias for at least 15 years but the professional connections I wouldn’t be able to keep elsewhere and job postings keep me semi-connected to LinkedIn.
“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.
Friends cajoled me onto it years ago, poking a once-sensitive part of my brain that used to tell me I need to be more social (partly thanks to meeting a scumbag old elementary school classmate who got in touch with me on FB about a year before he was arrested for torturing and holding a woman hostage in his apartment, this part of the brain is no longer active), but they were almost never on it, I could never find anyone I actually wanted to find, and then a couple years later, I realized almost everyone had left, leaving me feeling like someone who got in a heavy battle with diarrhea at a party and finally emerged to find everyone gone and the hosts asleep, so I quietly slipped out the door and canceled FB.
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.
I still listen to my CDs too, cuz, you know, lots of my indie underground shit never made it to Spotify.
(I do, and for the same reason, besides the fact that Spotify is an exploitative platform run by a guy who invests in AI weapons systems for warfare)
As a GenXer I fully reject the nu-metal association and point at the millennials for making it popular.
Uh oh. Looks like we have an internal GenX war brewing! Lol. Early GenXers like my brother definitely didn’t help make NeuMetal popular. You can’t deny Korn’s Follow the Leader album wasn’t amazing.
I sure can deny it. It’s terrible. But lots of millennials bought it :p
LOL, I’m with Harvey on this one.
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
I’m a Millennial, but I have a few Gen X friends. Among them, it seems like most did open Facebook accounts and sometimes even Instagram accounts in an attempt to keep up with the times, but they haven’t bothered posting anything in at least 10 years, and they rarely if ever check them
This is also pretty accurate. I’m at the Gen X / Millennial cusp, and I have signed up for, ignored, and subsequently abandoned all the major social media platforms and quite a few that never took off.
Seconded. I lose interest as soon as soon as the interface changes.
Late Gen-X and I have an IG account, that I use to follow posts from animal rescues—mostly for sloths—and a Ukrainian heavy metal belly dancer/attire designer that the Great Algorithm somehow correctly recommended. I haven’t even looked to see if people I know are on it.
Someone interested in rescue sloths and artisanal belly dancing outfits is what social networks used to call “the long tail” of users.
I’m the long tail of people.
Gen-X here; I’ll go one better. Yes, I opened a Facebook account years ago. Under an alias, directly contravening their TOS, intentionally. It exists to be able to read posts from those annoying organizations and small businesses that don’t update their websites and direct everybody to Facebook. I expected it to go full dystopia from the get-go.
I use other social media as well, under handles only. Decades on the Internet, and my online identify remains separate from my real one. I suspect many of my generational cohorts have done the same.
The only platform I’m active on is Discord, where servers can be private. I happen to be in a couple of gaming guilds with a large Gen-X population — as well as both older and younger folks. Another server is an offshoot from a gaming guild which is primarily social but invite-only so it’s privacy-controlled. (Oh, and we regularly roast mainstream social media there a lot...)
Right there with you. It’s the only social app I have, but I have yet to use it for anything social. A millennial friend helped me set up a burner FB account so I could shop Marketplace for the 70 percent or so of privately available junk that’s not cross-posted to Craigslist. It’s been very helpful in getting me to just buy new stuff so I can avoid the Skinnerian hell-box of trying to transact with an individual in fewer than ten messages and sooner than two weeks.
Oh wait… I still have Nextdoor, but I never engage and turned off the notifications. Sometimes it’s useful (“What was that explosion a few minutes ago?”) but mostly it’s just people demanding that The Authorities do something after someone stole their bike / smashed their flowerpot / slathered the lampposts in shredded chicken AGAIN (I actually got photos of that last one).
I’m Gen X and your friends sound cool. I was confused when everyone left myspace and moved over to Facebook. I eventually opened a Facebook account and found myself arguing with my uncle about politics like everyone else, so I abandoned the whole social media endeavor altogether.
I opened a Facebook account in 2008 (when I was still in high school) and it used to be a lot different. Very little political discussion outside of maybe a month or so before major elections, and corporate accounts and ads were almost non-existent. It was just a fun place to tell people what movies and music you were into, post photos of what you and your friends did, chat one-on-one or in friend groups, send your friends silly stickers or tag them in funny posts, and create events for people to attend (its one remaining useful feature). By about 10-12 years ago, it was becoming more corporatized and ad-focused as it became more mainstream, and then when everyone’s boomer parents started joining, it really went downhill with the political polarization that it’s known for now.
I was initially aggrieved at being left out, but then I realized that I don’t use any social media. I don’t count Autopian comments as social media.
* GenX
* Social
What
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.
Every single time. I’m sure it’s an unconscious oversight, but it’s pretty funny how often it happens.
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.
Heck, we have comments on internal communications at work and even those get wild.
Oh man, you’re reminding me of that happening where I work. Very large company (over 100k employees) and we of course have a website with news articles and the like.
COVID was a goldmine of unhinged rants on any article they posted. Anti-mask, anti-vax, anti/pro-whatever. And you’re signed into your work account, so nothing was anonymous. It got so bad they eventually disabled comments. The one that stands out to me the most was a lady saying she was trying to park somewhere, but some black people made her scared so she left? Something to that effect, with full name and picture out there.
That sounds a lot like ours. The company briefly required COVID vaccination and the comments went wild. If the company wanted to go after people who were attempting to use falsified vax cards or waivers, I’m pretty sure people were even openly sharing tips on where/how to get them. Pretty bold move to tell your employer you were defrauding them, but I guess that they were confident that no one wanted to wade through all the unhinged rants to find out.
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’m with you. I have never used LinkedIn to find a job, but I maintain it in case it will someday help. For some reason, it feels safer to have a longstanding account when/if it comes up than to make one when I actually need one.
LinkedIn sucks for looking for job nowadays though so hard to search sor specific fields and areas. I remember when it was a job board just like indeed or monster but now is this weird social media platform for companies/executives to post nonsense on with job listing buried in there. I guess I am now the old man shouting at cloud nearing the ripe age of 33 haha
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???
Nobody is real on LinkedIn. Anyone who posts there does so because they think it’ll get them noticed for a promotion. Everything posted there is a sanitized, sugarcoated, one-size-fits-all humblebrag.
Whether you’re bragging about a skill you think you have – “Patience is a vanishing skill, I practice patience every day by driving safely” – or by commenting on a topic you think recruiters will be impressed that you know about – “Company‘s bold new announcement speaks volumes about topic of expertise: insert a short blurb that summarizes what’s happening so people know that you know what it is” – the goal is always to make the most inoffensive, uncontroversial statement possible to convey something you think is marketable about yourself.
It’s gross.
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.