When I was a commodity broker, my survival depended on managing a single, terrifying fact: the incentives in my market heavily favored the buyer and seller cutting me out. To stay in business, my firm had to offer a service so flawless that clients chose to pay us despite the obvious financial logic of bypassing us. We were fighting the fundamental gravity of intermediation.
Most businesses built on intermediation struggle structurally. Private healthcare, dating apps, and job boards all face the same paradox: ultimate success results in the loss of the user, as neither a cured patient nor a newly hired candidate has a reason to stick around.
This same structural flaw is buried at the core of LinkedIn. On top of all its obvious issues that plague it, the platform actively disincentivizes its own use:
They pitch it as the definitive online CV, which means anyone treating it as such only logs in to update their resume.
They also sell it as a networking hub, but the moment you make a valuable connection, you take the conversation to email or a coffee shop or a call. The platform facilitates the handshake and immediately loses the interaction.
Because social media requires daily engagement, a core utility that pushes successful users away creates a massive void. This is where Goodhart's Law, the principle that when a measure becomes a target it ceases to be a good measure, starts to explain the platform's current state: LinkedIn needed a metric for engagement, so it optimized for posting.
But if you filter out the people updating CVs or moving real conversations off-platform, who is left to post? You are left mostly with the cringe wannabe influencers who actively drive people away, and serious professionals who would rather not have their employers seeing their unfiltered thoughts.
The obvious objection here is that some people do build real, valuable followings on LinkedIn by posting honestly. And that’s true. But if you look closely at who they are, they usually fall into two categories: independent founders who are selling directly to an audience, or executives with enough seniority that they are effectively un-fireable. Their risk tolerance is entirely different. For the median knowledge worker, the risk-to-reward ratio for genuine thought leadership is broken. If a mid-level professional shares a nuanced, critical thought about their industry, they risk alienating a current or future employer, hence they won't.
So how is a platform built on a paradox worth tens of billions of dollars?
Because it stopped being a networking tool, and became a compliance engine.
It is tempting to view this as a uniquely American pathology, but it is just as pervasive in Europe, ironically driven by the exact opposite incentive.
In the US knowledge sector, at-will employment creates a constant baseline of precarity, and you perform enthusiasm as a survival mechanism because the appearance of work is often compensated more highly than actual output.
In Europe, strong labor protections make it notoriously difficult to fire someone, yet the resulting behavior is identical. You perform compliance as a shield: look visibly busy, signal alignment, and management leaves you alone.
Whether motivated by American precarity or European security, the corporate economy has converged on a single system: one that prioritizes the theater of work over actual productivity. And LinkedIn survives exactly because it has established a monopoly on professional status signaling. It functions today as a panopticon for HR departments and recruiters, who are the ones actually paying for premium access. The people posting aren't the customers at all. They are the inventory: a self-updating database of credentialed risk profiles.
This explains the feed.
Users are incentivized to post fabricated parables about leadership because it signals to the algorithm, and to HR, that they are a safe, enthusiastic hire. Posts are no longer meant to share ideas, they exist purely to signal compliance.
The hardest implication of this isn't just that LinkedIn is full of bad writing—plenty of the internet is. It’s that we have financialized our professional identities to the point where having a public, unfiltered thought is a career liability. As long as HR departments are the real customers, the platform will continue to optimize for sterilized compliance over actual connection.
The likely outcome isn't that LinkedIn collapses, it is far too entrenched for that; instead, true professional networking simply abandons the platform. Much of it goes fully dark, fracturing into private group chats and invite-only Slack channels where the risk of public signaling is removed. The rest migrates to platforms like X, which has been the go-to networking hub for industries like finance and tech for years already because it offers exactly what LinkedIn can't: information moves faster, and profiles can be anonymous.
When the official professional town square becomes an HR panopticon, genuine networking requires either closed doors or a mask. The public square itself will remain perfectly polite, and entirely empty of value.