The Downfall of LinkedIn

By now, virtually all if not all of LinkedIn’s idiosyncrasies are common knowledge. The problems with these idiosyncrasies and the frustration of users forced to deal with them is just as well known.

The subreddit LinkedInLunatics, dedicated to calling out irritating behavior on the platform, such as the banality of influencer regurgitated “content”, predatory tactics of coaches and consultants, and general derangement not only has a large user base who frequently engage in lampooning the aforementioned behaviors, but has made its way onto LinkedIn itself. The lunatics themselves often feature on the subreddit for their public displays of antipathy towards being featured.

In general, LinkedIn has also undergone extensive “enshittification”, meaning the actual functions and the experience have degraded significantly. There is no shortage of lamentations about how LinkedIn has become Facebook 2.0 because of the lack of regulation of the abundant non-business related content. Political diatribes, in addition to mundane life events such as weddings, apocryphal kid stories, and trips to the hospital being spun into a metaphor about business-to-business sales have caused a general fatigue to set in.

LinkedIn has done its part to purposely enshittify its own product. For general users trying to use LinkedIn for what it was intended for, networking and job searching, the experience has gradually diminished to something unrecognizable. Searches for profiles and companies are being limited, as are invitations to connect, all so LinkedIn can charge to unlock unlimited use by subscribing to a premium version.

It’s unsurprising a profit addicted giant like Microsoft, LinkedIn’s parent company, would transform their acquisition this way. It fits with a pattern of behavior for big companies to “not see the forest for the trees” as the saying goes. Shortsightedness is all too regular in corporate America.

It seems hard to argue Microsoft is doing anything wrong. Revenues have grown tremendously in a short time, from $2.3B in 2017 to $16.4B in 2024. What Microsoft is overlooking is the decline in quality of a product or service as a reward for profit maximization often diminishes the offering’s long term success.

One of the best cautionary tales of this occurring is in the social media space itself, which only makes Microsoft’s shortsightedness regarding LinkedIn pretty ironic.

For those of us old enough to remember, way back before the Meta rebrand, when you had to put “thefacebook.com” in your browser to login the king of the social media space was MySpace, which was undergoing the social media equivalent of a, to borrow some euphemistic phrasing from SpaceX, “Rapid Unscheduled Disassembly.”

MySpace exploded in popularity quickly in the early 2000’s. It achieved remarkable organic growth as an early way for people to keep in touch, have a platform that can reach a broad audience rapidly, and enabled local artists to grow a devoted fan base organically. Its founders cashed out in 2005, less than 2 years after launching, for $580M, by selling to Rupert Murdoch’s company, NewsCorp.

The decay began almost immediately. MySpace gave users complete freedom, and it turns out too much freedom is a bad thing. Profiles became covered in visually offensive flashing colors with jarring music playing automatically upon loading, often causing the viewer’s computer to crash. In addition, the site itself became infested with bot and hacked profiles running scams as bizarre as hawking ED pills. It was particularly offputting seeing those pitches come from a profile that, ostensibly at least, represented a woman.

The exodus was rapid and NewsCorp’s investment quickly became a disaster, selling to Justin Timberlake in 2009 for $35M. While MySpace still exists, it’s mostly just useful in MBA programs about how to squander first entrant advantage in a burgeoning industry.

Whatever else Mark Zuckerberg may be, he was at least prescient enough to foresee these difficulties, wisely limiting user freedoms and maintaining a standardized and clean interface. The rest, as they say, is history.

LinkedIn’s current trajectory has echoes of MySpace’s. Not only do they not regulate content, they’ve even introduced short form video content, continuing the trend of hoping to ride TikTok’s success. But, doesn’t LinkedIn becoming Facebook/TikTok 2.0 only mean it will slide into irrelevance? After all, what do we need an equally crappy version of something that already exists for?

I doubt anyone at Microsoft is really ready to challenge the status quo and raise the alarm about eventual irrelevance of LinkedIn because of its single-minded drive for profit growth, and if they do they’ll probably be ignored, so LinkedIn’s current course is unlikely to change.

That being said, maybe this is an opportunity for a new, business and work related social media platform to fill the current void, the dearth of platforms that remain true to the mission of providing a space for business and career growth and professional networking is obvious.

Doing so would be replete with challenges. Social media, by its very nature, is strengthened by user growth. LinkedIn’s current position protects it well against new entrants to the market. Furthermore, I’m sure it’s very difficult to actually police content and ensure it’s appropriate, a term that may be tough to actually define in this context.

It could very well be that social media has matured to the point incumbents are too well protected to see their dominance challenged, but many companies have been in such positions before only to collapse into irrelevance after failing to adapt.