Nobody knows how the whole system works

Your intellectual fly is open | The Observation Deck

Note: This was originally published as a LinkedIn post on November 11, 2025. I need to make a painful confession: somehow, LinkedIn has become an important social network to me. This isn’t necessarily due to LinkedIn’s sparkling competence, of course. To the contrary, LinkedIn is the Gerald Ford of social networks: the normal one that was left standing as the Richard Nixons and the Spiro Agnews of social media imploded around them. As with Gerald Ford, with LinkedIn we know that we’re getting something a bit clumsy and boring, but (as with post-Watergate America!), we’re also getting something that isn’t totally crooked — and that’s actually a bit of a relief.

How to beat LinkedIn: The Game

A strategy guide for using a semi-pointless social network in all the wrong ways.

Why is LinkedIn so cringe?

The answer is in its business model and algorithm.

Cofacts

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That smiling LinkedIn profile face might be a computer-generated fake

Stanford researchers uncovered more than 1,000 of these LinkedIn profiles. A technology that has been used to promote misinformation online has now entered the corporate world.

Shifts in U.S. Social Media Use, 2020–2024: Decline, Fragmentation, and Enduring Polarization

The social media ecosystem appears to be in flux. Twitter’s rebranding to X has come to symbolize a broader reorganization of online publics – political reshuffling, user attrition, and uncertainty over the role of legacy platforms. Simultaneously, the shift from text-based, networked feeds toward algorithmically curated, short-form video has accelerated, with TikTok setting the pace for the wider ecosystem [18, 14, 16]. At the same time, everyday communication increasingly migrates from large, open networks to semi-private spaces such as group chats and messaging apps. Commentators describe a digital public sphere in transition: smaller, more fragmented, less dominated by traditional social networking sites, and rise of more broadcast-oriented forms of media – with some even suggesting that we are seeing the beginning of the end of the social media era.

Why the next professional network will look nothing like LinkedIn

As LinkedIn unbundles, SaaS companies emerge as leaders of the new professional networks

FediForum | Growing the Open Social Web:<br>An Online Un-Workshop

Since the Twitter takeover by Elon Musk over three years ago, the Open Social Web has been adopted by an enthusiastic community. People world-wide are building and using open social platforms and open social protocols to better interact with others online.

The Filipino virtual assistants behind LinkedIn’s “thought leadership” content mill

For $7 an hour, virtual assistants use AI tools to write LinkedIn posts and comments on behalf of Western executives.

LinkedIn | Acquired Podcast

Ben and David cover the 3-day-old acquisition of LinkedIn by Microsoft for $26.2 billion. They cover LinkedIn's founding story by Reid Hoffman, break down their core businesses, analyze recent stock behavior, and speculate on the future of the company inside Microsoft. The big question - were they worth the price tag?

The Weird, Fragmented World of Social Media After Twitter - The Atlan…

archived 7 Aug 2023 02:41:57 UTC

My 2024 thoughts on the state of social media

I see a continued fragmentation of social media as people leave X(Twitter).

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