LinkedIn and solipsistic peacocking

2025-04-23

Emily Gorcenski observes about LinkedIn:

I’ve been on the internet a long time. Usenet. Forums. Email lists fighting over moon landing conspiracy theories. Facebook. I had 100k+ followers and a checkmark in the heady days of Twitter. I’ve become an expert in the alt right social media ecosystem. And yet, LinkedIn is by far the absolute worst when it comes to misinformation and low information literacy.

For all the try-hard thought leadership being self-promoted here, the rhetorical and critical thinking skills on display are at an absolute low point. At least in debating the moon landing conspiracy theorists would read your sources and try to come up with a half-baked counterpoint. Here, you can literally spoon feed someone a whole buffet of counterfactuals and they breeze right by as if they don’t exist.

LinkedIn has changed a bit over the years - some users observe that it now feels like Facebook used to.

Some things haven’t changed. As you can see in Em’s post, LinkedIn is still for solipsistic peacocking - showing yourself off to an audience you barely acknowledge exists. It’s hard to change your DNA.