Why is everyone so fake on LinkedIn?

A while back I was in the office at a Fortune 500 company. 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.

Anyway, on LinkedIn, people act like their current or next CEO is reading their posts. Because they might be.

I agree that it's fake, and 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 basically a marketing channel. For companies' marketing team to market their products, for HR teams to market how "awesome" is to work at the company and for people to market themselves.

I am of the thought that most marketing is bullshit, hence I believe most of what you will read in LinkedIn is bullshit as well.

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, looks at what all I'm learning, wow Jim it has really been ten years at Saber, wow the years have flown.

Say the wrong thing, canceled, not only from future employment but current.

There is nothing genuine about a corporate business lunch and this is just another location.

> Why so much fake enthusiasm ?

Lack of anonymity. 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. (see Miranda rights)

Other platforms like reddit and Twitter don't mind anonymous accounts, which ironically invites more honest criticism and discussion, as it doesn't directly link profiles to professional careers.

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 think long-term this will doom facebook (the website), but not meta.

I call it CringedIn for a reason. People acting like they just had the orgasm of a lifetime when receiving a laptop, a mouse, and a bad quality nylon backpack from Tata Consulting Services and the following automated/template response from the employer always gets me. The whole "boss/leader", "We're a family", "We have collaborators not employees" trip is icing on the cake. Posts from "Influencers" I'm not subscribed to or "inspirational" posts finding their way to my page. The threads with thousands of messages that say "Interested". People I screened out during interviews for lacking basic skills inviting me to workshops to teach me the very skills I declined them for lacking. It is a freak show. A creature to be admired not for its beauty, but for its ugliness.

Keep in mind that I have these emotions and thoughts in a fraction of a second. They hit me in the tiny time I spend on the platform to check or édit something.

IMO the worst is middle aged guys walking recording self-help/promotion sales selfie videos.

But what do you expect them to say?

Excited to talk at this upcoming conference --> My company just paid thousands of dollars for me to get on stage and have the audience listen to an informercial.

Excited to be named one this years people who are persons --> I spend all my time working to make partners at a Consultancy/PE/VC Bank rich, but it-least they paid to nominate me, I can show my parents! Do people still read magazines?

But it's a core facet of their business model. Their secret sauce, as it were.

That is to say: the intrinsic feature set is of course based on self-promotion; at the same time, nearly everyone on LinkedIn (by virtue of the fact that they have time to tend to their profile, beyond a perfunctory business card level) knows, on some level, that they aren't that special. Plus they know that their profile can be looked at any minute, by anyone, from friends to past colleagues to prospective future ones, to crushes and exes to your old friggen higs school crew, for heaven's sake.

So they're always looking over their shoulder, and on some level, fearing their own shadow. The only thing that (momentarily) lifts this veil of gloom (at feeling fundamentally unworthy and illegitimate) is of course more positive attention, or at least the feeling that their profile is slightly less boring than those of their peers.

So they're they go, sprucing their chronology, finding a better headshot or background image... while everyone else is doing the same. Which leads to more gloom, and more insecurity. All as a proxy, a stand-in for building meaningful professional relationships and improving one's actual skill set -- that is to say, one's intrinsic relationship and career capital (to use a catchphrase of this cottage industry).

Meanwhile, an entire generation has grown up believing axiomatically that a strong LinkedIn profile is absolutely essential to your job search, because how else are recruiters going to know anything about you? And you have to put up a headshot because otherwise you must have something to hide.

Thus the cycle of perpetual inadequacy goes on and on, like an Escher staircase.

When I mentor interns about how to present or interact in meetings, I always stress that if they are a stakeholder in a project that is discussed, they should be prepared to add something intelligent to a discussion about it.

“Something intelligent” isn’t pithy commentary, it is a contribution that adds some value to what is happening.

In the context of LinkedIn, 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. Many people are very bad at it.

Personally, I post about the nonprofit organization whose board I serve on. I may get some brownie points, but mostly it’s marketing so I can try to liberate peoples money later to donate to the cause.

LinkedIn is cringe levels of shameless self promotion, feel good corporate bs, and spam from recruiters. But it also has gotten me jobs and helped me keep in touch with old colleagues so I tolerate it.

Just yesterday I saw a truly insane post from an AWS VP moving on to the next role. Thanking dozens of people for life changing experiences and getting thousands of likes and hundreds of comments. I have no earthly clue what is going on there.

I love LinkedIn because it helps me stay in touch with people who I went to school with and old co-workers as I deleted my Facebook account years ago. If I didn't have LinkedIn, it would have been much harder to stay in touch with those people.

I do think that LinkedIn has a lot of low quality content so I entirely avoid the feed and use it more so as a rolodex and that alone makes it worth it for me.

I've always thought that showing off is poor taste and will never do it even if it's now somehow trendy to be a shallow sell out aka marketing.

People are fake on all social media. LinkedIn content is just more narrow and commercial, so that compounds the effect and makes it seem more pronounced.

It's a recruitment tool, so you see the same things you see in an interview.

It just feels awkward because you've crammed all candidates into the same room, and they're now trying to shout louder than everyone else, leading to an escalation in "enthusiasm".

I don't know the answer, but I would like to take this opportunity to announce how excited I am to be an active contributor in an international project that aggregates tech and innovation news and delivers it to millions of exceptional people around the planet: hackernews.

#newsthatmatter #grateful #workhardplayhard #money #neuralnetworks #nanoscale #web3 #blockchain #openforhire #leverage #parallelmarkets #hitthegroundrunning #synergy

I like keeping in touch with former colleagues and friends and giving them a thumbs up when they share something they are proud of.

I’m grateful to have some sense of job security from the weekly recruiter messages I get.

The fake enthusiasm was a big feature at my last company and it got us nowhere. It’s a red flag for me and as an manager, I’d be very skeptical of a candidate who spent too much time trying to be an influencer on LinkedIn.

As long as you don't hide the identity of the users, you won't have an honest platform. You want to see how people really think, give the anonymity and you see the true society, good or bad.

Just yesterday someone suggested me to set up a linkedin profile, ensuring a rapid career onset.

I never thought linkedin had any value (beside being a weird phonebook). How is it these days ?

I spent some time on the platform a little over a year ago when looking for a new job. People outright rip other "influencers" on the platform off. I have seen, likely dozens of posts, all worded very similarly, along the lines of "This candidate wasn't a good hire on paper, but I went with my gut and two years later they are the CEO!". It takes them a couple of paragraphs to do what I did in a sentence there, but multiple unrelated people told that same narrative with minor details interchanged. Some of them direct copy and pastes. All within a week or two of each other.

Don't get me started on the "tech" people I've seen on there, they spend more time talking about getting a job in tech than coding, complete hacks (and not in a good way).

Well not everyone. There are people who treat it like Facebook and start sharing the funny links and random stuff and in some cases their political opinions and conspiracy theories.

The boring fake alternatives of everyone else are much better.

I use it but I use it very specifically in a small set of groups around areas of interest, or to actually prevent people from going overboard on X solution (e.g. coach people to think through requirements instead of just taking any answer to "what's the best product in X software category?" at face value), rather than do product fluffing.

Conversely I used LinkedIn Learning a lot, and I like to follow certain companies of interest, but yes, there is an overabundance of "lookee lookee at my stuff, but I'm not in marketing, really!" kind of discourse.

If you are a simple working professional (i.e. not chasing clout, leads, or candidates) using LinkedIn is simple:

* Do not look at the feed. Ever. You are unable to meaningfully curate it, or even create things a la Twitter Lists to separate the wheat from the chaff. It is garbage; ignore it.

* Do not connect with recruiters or direct sellers (read: real estate agents, financial planners, influencers in your field, etc), ever. They are worthless connections, and you can still receive and send messages without a connection, if it's actually something of interest to you.

* Keep your personal profile up to date and shiny for prospective employers and colleagues. This is just basic career hygiene in the 21st century.

* Do look at the notifications - it's still got useful information like people changing jobs, getting promoted, work anniversaries, etc. that provide direct opportunities to keep up the relationship. (Notifications have started getting spammier ... but anything at all valuable is there.)

* Endorse, recommend, and directly reach out to your actual colleagues you admrie and wish to endorse, and don't be shy about directly asking them to reciprocate.

That's it; you can maintain healthy relationships with your peers and ex-colleagues, establish a working brand for your skills and experience for others to find you, and avoid all the nonsense OP is rightfully scornful of.

The social part of it reminds me of the record company party hosts at the "Black Album" album launch in the movie "This Is Spinal Tap." Fake giant toothy smiles everywhere. LinkedIn social conversations remind me of awkward corporate birthday parties, but in text form.

LinkedIn does serve its professional purpose well. I haven't gotten too many new gigs from it, but I get some, and it nurtures a subset of repeat customers of your own curation. That's pretty much the majority of what I use it for.

At some stage LI started to ship similar features as FB, that is when a lot of content in feeds started changing drastically. A ton of influencers and aspiring influencers started trending, others picked up the trend to stay at pace.

Fake enthusiasm, emotional posts, funny(goofy) posts all geared towards getting engagement. Some folks have business(consultancy) that needs them to have the exposure.

The LinkedIn feed is actually great if you pretend it’s satire.

It is a sign of social intelligence.

Most people understand, mostly unconsciously, that being "fake" (i.e., complimenting others for insignificant achievements, sharing fake stories and relaying content produced by other people) 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.

For example: when you see 50 likes to a comment, the author is very likely to feel rewarded and accomplished. However, LinkedIn will hide the fact that probably 500 people thought that content utterly uninteresting, wrong or despicable, but were smart enough to let it go.

Being "true" on LinkedIn, and any other social network, is committing social suicide in my opinion.

Because it's not a community, it's a marketplace. Never confuse the two.

Because you have to be fake at work, and LinkedIn is basically work.

My question is whether those long posts people make when they change companies are about ego or if it somehow helps their career to make a big deal out of it publicly.

I deleted my second LI account earlier this year, I just couldn't take it anymore and dropped out of the world's biggest bullshitting competition.

Social networks want to live forever, they have no dismantle-by date unlike the human networks that facilitated human ingenuity in the past.

To fuel their vampire existence they optimize for the inexhaustible supply of fresh bullshit; easy to amplify self-promotion and simple claims of authority that are averse to deeper inspection maintain network "health".

Keeping in touch with former colleagues and looking for new jobs is about it for me. The marketing feed is bogus to me.

I see very little on LinkedIn that is outright fake. What I do see is a heavy filter put on people's experiences. But that makes sense to me - this is not a social media site - it is an online resume. Don't get fooled into thinking it is anything more or less just because they have a news feed.

For an eye-opening experience, explore the network of people who list themselves as recruiters for oil companies.

People are fake on linkedln because they are afraid to offend any. All there business clients and employers are on the service. If you want real people are more inclined when they are just a username or anonymous. Something I noticed through the years. Real ID means faker people.

i have found hitting long pressing like and choosing "Insightful" (light bulb emoji) or "Curious" (hmm... emoji) on posts outside of the overton window to be a very fun way to push boundaries on linkedIn while doing nothing reprehensible per say.

if enough of us do this, we can actually extend the overton window outside of the current straightjacket and actually push toward a more free and enjoyable society.

your fellow connections will, over time, be informed of your activity; ("Bob finds this Insightful....")

worst case scenario - they might have to begrudgingly admit you find something insightful or curious that they would rather not think about;

best case scenario we start to normalize free and open discussion in the world's most sterile, bland environment (corporate)

It's because fake enthusiasm is deeply ingrained in corporate culture (at least in the US).

I got so much spam from there and it was not doing me any good with all the fake signalljng so I switched it off. I did not delete my account yet; if it doesn't seem worth it to switch it on within 3 years from now I will delete.

People are that “fake” in real life too, it’s just harder to notice

On a side note, if a platfrom like LinkedIn wanted to have less self-promotion kind of content - what sort of tactics could they apply to steer the users?

LinkedIn is basically a giant water-cooler where everyone can show-off. That i s the incentive, the network decided to promote.

I was just on LinkedIn before seeing this post. I think LinkedIn is horrible. The fakeness on there disgusts me.

Me in a position of power,

Poor schmuck who's desperate

Me showing pity on the schmuck

Schmuck uses the opportunity

Me showing LinkedIn how great I'm

It get worse since Microsoft owns it. But who expected anything different?

>> Why so much fake enthusiasm ?

Because fake enthusiasm gives you online points? And because LinkedIn people are really easy to impress. Just use mediapipe and record yourself pressing some virtual keys and you will be a celebrity.

Because they want something from the audience.