The decline and fall of LinkedIn

In the beginning...

Years ago,  I remember someone telling me about a great website where you could connect with people in business and build your network: it was called LinkedIn. I joined, and became an enthusiastic user, even paying for Premium for a long time. But over the last few years it's really gone downhill and I see no product innovation to bring it back. This blog post is about the decline of LinkedIn and what Microsoft could do to make it worthwhile again. 

(Gemini's view of the decline of LinkedIn.)

Gods with feet of clay

One of the first real signs of trouble I saw was the near-canonization of some business leaders. A CEO would post his views of the world that typically included some semi-insightful posts about valuing employees. Other LinkedIn users promoted these posts way beyond any rational assessment of their value and the CEO became something of a philosopher-king. 

Then the inevitable happened. The CEO was ousted for poor performance or even worse, ousted for sexual harassment. In one case, I saw a CEO go from being praised effusively one day to being condemned the next, by the same people.

Once you've seen this cycle happen a few times, it's hard to take it all seriously.

Junk videos

There are a ton of short videos on LinkedIn. There's an entire video genre of people in Asia doing ingenuous things with no safety precautions. Another video genre is machines doing cool stuff like cutting wood or pressing metal. Nice, but they dilute business content; if I want to see videos, I'll go to TikTok or YouTube. 

Junk political posts

A lot of social media is a cesspit of low-quality political posting. Sadly, LinkedIn has gone the same way. I see many people posting memes critical of whichever government/country/company has offended their snowflake beliefs. These memes are devoid of nuance, wit, or intelligence and often have a real nastiness to them. It seems like some people are angry all the time. It's exhausting and I don't want to see it in on a business site.

Sadly, it's not just memes. I've read a number of posts attacking climate science or vaccines or renewable energy. In a couple of cases, I've really dug in and looked at the arguments and data behind the claims. Spoiler alert: they never add up. In one case, the author was making a foolhardy claim about China's adoption of renewable energy. Even their cherry-picked data didn't stand up to scrutiny and they were taken apart in the comments. Their response? They said it was their opponents' duty to provide data! I'm all for people posting content that challenges the orthodoxy, but it has to be good quality;  Retraction Watch are doing it right, LinkedIn posters are mostly doing it wrong.

Junk political posts are like stones in a shoe. You can tolerate it for a while, but there comes a time when you need to shake it out. 

Fakes and fraud

Over the last few years, I've started to get odd connection requests. The requestors' LinkedIn profiles looked really strange and their photos looked too perfect. It turned out, I wasn't alone. The site was inundated with fake profiles, many of which were used for attempted fraud.

LinkedIn did try and crack down, but they were very late doing anything at all, and even now, I'm still getting what I think are fake connection requests. 

The fakery is nudging me to only connect with people I've met in person, but this means I bump into another shortcoming: the lack of innovation.

Lack of innovation

Amazingly, there's no way to add an annotation to a contact. Let's say you and and I meet at an event and we connect on LinkedIn.  Quite reasonably, we want to make a note about where we met and we'd liked to do it on LinkedIn because that's where our connection's profile is. We can't do it because there's no such feature.

Of course, there's also the issue of how we connect in the first place. We both have our phones. You'd think there would be a simple way of making a connection, but no. One of us has to find our QR code (not easy), while the other scans. The scanning person has to find the connection link on the person's profile which is sometimes easily accessible but sometimes it's buried away. This leads to some farcical screen pecking. It's astounding they haven't made it easier.

LinkedIn Learning

Oh wow. So much low-quality content. 

No competition

Of course, one of the causes of these problems is the lack of competition. Switching isn't easy; it's hard to build a network and there are huge sunk costs for everyone on LinkedIn. But this situation is unlikely to persist forever. 

How can they turn this around?

They really do need to innovate. Not small incremental changes or nonsense changes like re-arranging where functionality sits, but real changes that make a difference to users. 

How about starting with making the in-person connection process easier? That's got to be low-hanging fruit. Annotations would be another welcome feature.

Next up, improve the quality of posts. They could start with removing the outright political junk (that means junk from all political stances), especially political memes. 

After that, reduce the number of videos and make them business focused.

Meetup.com and related sites do a mostly good job for events. If LinkedIn were to move into this space, they could link people in person and virtually. Similarly, LinkedIn could move into the virtual event space. Instead of signing up with your email address, you'd sign up with your LinkedIn profile.