Opinion
LinkedIn is my favourite place on the internet. There, I said it
Tim Duggan
Careers contributorThere’s a place on the internet that some people love to hate. It’s toxically positive, I hear, or it’s fake, or packed with people just bragging with every post.
Thomas Mitchell, writing in this masthead last month, wrote that logging onto this website “increasingly feels like going to a friend’s party only to find yourself trapped in a conversation with a stranger.”
LinkedIn’s model ensures the worst impulses of the internet are tempered. If the price to pay is to scroll past the occasional large ego, then sign me up.Credit: Jason Alden/Bloomberg
Well, I’m here to brush all the haters off, and declare that this destination, LinkedIn, is actually my favourite little corner on the internet. There, I said it.
If there’s one thing we should all be able to agree on, it’s that the modern internet is basically a cesspit. By that, I mean that most of the social media sites, where Australians aged 16 to 64 spend almost two hours a day according to Meltwater research, have far outgrown their original intentions.
Take Facebook, for example. Facebook used to be an interesting global meeting place for friends and people we knew, but over the past few years has devolved primarily into a repository to view memes and family photo albums as you duck and weave around crypto scam ads.
Then there’s Twitter, rebranded to X. There was once a time, not that long ago, when Twitter was a loud, messy, vibrant town square where a wide range of voices met, argued and occasionally produced moments of joy together.
When the alternative is getting drawn into political fights, time-sucking memes or dance routines, give me LinkedIn any day of the week.
X is now a sad shadow of its former self, and you can’t go more than a few scrolls without blue-checked users aggressively shouting far-right politics or adolescent jokes at you. And that’s just Elon Musk.
Instagram’s awash with influencers trying their hardest to influence you, and TikTok’s endless scrolling sucks away all sense of time and place until you’re able to extract yourself from its clutches.
Which brings us to LinkedIn, the last island of sanity in a sea of social noise. Somehow, improbably, it has remained consistently similar in tone and content since it was launched 20 years ago. And that is a truly remarkable feat.
Of course there’s some humblebragging, back-slapping, hashtagging puffery on there, but I’ll happily wade through those when they’re balanced out by politeness, positivity, support and education. LinkedIn reflects the environment it’s a part of, and most of our workplaces also contain colleagues who demonstrate the full spectrum of behaviours above.
I know how hard it is to maintain a tone as a community scales. Over the last two decades I’ve launched many communities on the internet as part of my time running a digital media company (sadly, however, none of them reached the dizzying scale of LinkedIn).
It is extremely difficult to maintain the idealistic intentions you start with as a community grows and morphs to reflect a new generation of users.
LinkedIn’s masterstroke, and the key to its success, is that it directly connects your work reputation to your public profile. This ensures the worst impulses of the internet, like trolling and name-calling, are tempered. And if the price to pay for that is to scroll past the occasional large ego, then sign me up.
A simple test of the long-term viability of any business is to ask: what would happen if it didn’t exist tomorrow? Would people actually care? Or would they just go about their normal day? I’d argue that most people would, eventually, get over the absence of most social media sites and find other ways to fill in time on a bus or train.
But LinkedIn? It’s part of the business fabric of how professionals connect with others in the workplace, especially as a unique way to be able to search for and contact almost anyone in the world you’d like to reach out to.
In fact, when I have spare time to check any of the social media sites, my first go-to is usually LinkedIn. I actually want to read stories of people celebrating their successes, telling us about the highlight of their week or sharing something they’re proud of. It makes me feel a little bit warmer on the inside, and that’s a rarity on today’s internet.
When the alternative is getting drawn into never-ending political fights, time-sucking memes, dance routines or the 147 family photos my Aunty posted today, give me LinkedIn any day of the week.
Tim Duggan is the author of Work Backwards: The Revolutionary Method to Work Smarter and Live Better. He writes a regular newsletter at timduggan.substack.com
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