Apparently LinkedIn is ruined...

LinkedIn Is Changing, and Maybe That Is the Point

At least that seems to be the diagnosis from the growing number of people announcing their departure, taking breaks, staging some version of a LinkedIn strike, or writing wistful little obituaries for whatever this place used to be before more people began showing up with stories or opinions, even humor and vulnerability, either way, considerably less interest in behaving like digital résumés with profile pictures attached.

Whenever I read one of those posts, I find myself wondering what exactly we are grieving, because human beings have always had an uneasy relationship with change, especially once we have spent enough time somewhere to understand its customs. Familiarity has a way of disguising itself as correctness. We learn the rhythm of a place, discover which doors open easily, understand which language earns approval, and eventually begin to experience that arrangement as the natural order of things.

Then the music changes...new people arrive... the culture stretches around them, and before long, somebody is standing at the edge of the room explaining that everything was better before everyone else showed up.

Sometimes decline is real, although I suspect there are plenty of occasions when what we are grieving is simply the comfort of knowing how the world worked.

When the Room Changes

I came to LinkedIn after spending years on Instagram, which has begun to feel, at least from where I am standing, like one enormous scrolling infomercial where every third person has somehow discovered the simultaneous secrets of wealth, enlightenment, perfect relationships, spiritual liberation, and visible abdominal muscles, all of which could apparently become mine through a webinar and three manageable payments of $37.

Incidentally, I was in Tulum recently and, after filling my Vespa at a local petrol station, I noticed a sign advertising BOGO ayahuasca, which made me wonder whether the same people had simply diversified.

I wanted a different room, so I started spending more time on LI, and perhaps I am exactly the kind of person some people believe is contributing to the decline because I never really learned how to use LinkedIn according to the traditional script.

Business has always been entangled with the rest of my life because my mind has never respected the neat fences people like to build between professional and personal experience. A conversation with one of my children can alter the way I think about leadership. The remains of a relationship can teach me something about boundaries that later walks straight into a client engagement. An absurd encounter in an airport can reveal more about human behavior than another business book ever could. A mistake I made ten years ago can suddenly become relevant while I am trying to understand why a founder keeps circling the same problem inside his company.

Experience enters through different doors and eventually gathers in the same room... that is how my brain works, and apparently for the minority that are catching on that LI can be a different type of room than it has been.

LinkedIn became more useful to me once I stopped trying to divide myself into professionally approved compartments and simply allowed the whole person to participate.

Since then, some remarkable things have happened...

My podcast has been filled with people I probably would have gone my entire life without meeting. Clients have found me because something I wrote made them curious about how I think. Strangers who first appeared as small photographs beside comments eventually became people sitting across from me at real tables having real conversations, sometimes with bourbon and cigars involved, which remains one of the more convincing arguments I have encountered for social media.

But the thing I value most has been the human connection surrounding it, because somewhere along the way LinkedIn stopped feeling like a résumé with Wi-Fi and started feeling like a room filled with people.

Rooms Are Messy Because People Are Messy

Any room occupied by enough human beings will eventually contain brilliance sitting a few feet from insecurity, generosity sharing space with ego, someone saying something that quietly rearranges another person’s thinking, and someone else demonstrating such extraordinary confidence in such limited self-awareness that you begin wondering whether adulthood should require periodic recertification.

That feels deeply human to me... what interests me more is what may actually be underneath all the complaining, because I think our definition of professionalism is beginning to change.

For a long time, professionalism required editing. We learned the approved language, softened the unruly edges, assembled the acceptable version of ourselves, and entered the room wearing whatever vocabulary and posture allowed us to belong there, and that architecture made sense inside the institutions that created it.

The world right now forming around us however, seems increasingly interested in the person beneath the polish.

The Person Beneath the Title

People increasingly want to understand how someone thinks before they decide whether they trust them, because expertise on its own only tells part of the story. They want some sense of the life that shaped the perspective, the experiences that hardened or softened the judgment, and the peculiar way a person has learned to make meaning from what has happened to them.

That matters even more now because polished language has become remarkably easy to produce. Artificial intelligence can write something competent, coherent, professional, and perfectly formatted in seconds, which means polish by itself carries far less signal than it once did. The differentiator is becoming the thing that technology still cannot manufacture on your behalf... the lived point of view underneath the words.

That does not require turning every professional platform into a confessional booth however, because discernment is still part of adulthood and some thoughts deserve the dignity of remaining private. What it does require, at least for me, is enough of the person to remain visible that the work still feels inhabited.

I want to feel that someone has actually wrestled with the idea before publishing it, that the opinion cost them something to arrive at, that the perspective has fingerprints on it. I want disagreement that sends me back into my own thinking with better questions, and I am often far more interested in the wandering story that reveals how someone became who they are than another perfectly engineered carousel explaining a framework with seven pillars and a suspiciously symmetrical acronym.

Some of the most revealing things I have learned about people have arrived sideways, through a story about a father they still think about, a relationship that rearranged them, a child who exposed something true, or an ordinary moment that quietly changed the way they saw the world.

That kind of writing tells me something expertise alone cannot... it tells me there is a person inside the title, and increasingly, that may be the part worth paying attention to.

We Asked for Personal Brands

Perhaps that is the irony hidden inside all of this.

For years we encouraged people to build personal brands, develop distinct voices, tell stories, share perspectives, become visible, and bring more of themselves into their work.

Eventually people listened, now the personal part has actually arrived.

And with it comes all the texture of a real life, i.e. humor, uncertainty, conviction, contradiction, strange observations, hard-earned perspective, occasional profanity, and all the complicated evidence that someone has actually lived through something before deciding to write about it.

Of course LinkedIn is changing, every room changes once enough people stop merely passing through it and begin making themselves at home.

The furniture gets moved, the conversations get louder, someone changes the music, new customs appear beside old ones, and eventually the people who remember the original arrangement begin wondering who gave everyone permission to rearrange the place.

That feels less like the destruction of LinkedIn and more like the natural life cycle of any community large enough to become culturally interesting.

I’ll Keep the Music Down After Ten

I am comfortable participating in that experiment, and if my small contribution to whatever LinkedIn is becoming happens to include telling stories, thinking aloud, wandering into philosophy when I was supposedly discussing branding, talking about my children because they teach me things about humanity, occasionally saying fuck, and meeting strangers for bourbon because something they wrote made me curious enough to know the person behind the post, I suspect I will continue doing exactly that.

I will, however, try to keep the music down after ten...

About Deevo

Deevo is a brand strategist, storyteller, photographer, podcast host, father, professional overthinker, and occasional LinkedIn nuisance who has spent more than two decades trying to understand why people choose what they choose, believe what they believe, and occasionally pay consultants obscene amounts of money to tell them something they already knew but needed to hear from somebody else.

These days, he works with founders and leaders to untangle the complicated intersection between who they are, what they are building, and how the rest of the world experiences it. Somewhere in the process, conversations tend to wander through business, identity, psychology, relationships, philosophy, bad decisions, and whatever else happens to be sitting on the table that day.

You can find him on LinkedIn, where he writes about branding and business whenever he can resist wandering into everything else.