Is LinkedIn Still a Tool or Just a Stage for Bla-bla?
There was a time (a few years ago, before the deployment of bad bots on online social or professional platforms) when LinkedIn felt simple. You logged in to look for opportunities, connect with people in your industry, or update your CV when life nudged you into a new chapter.
Somewhere along the way, it changed.
Today, opening LinkedIn often feels like walking into a polished conference hallway that never ends. Everyone is celebrating something. Everyone is honoured, excited, or grateful. Career moments are packaged into inspirational narratives, and ordinary tasks are framed as life lessons for an invisible audience.
What feels increasingly absent is something quieter and more complicated to fake: honest work.
The Rise of Professional Performance
Scrolling through LinkedIn, it’s rare to find honest conversations about uncertainty, learning curves, or work in progress. Instead, the platform rewards certainty and outcomes. Success is carefully edited, mistakes are quietly removed, and growth appears only once it’s complete.
What remains is performance.
Professional personas are optimised for visibility rather than usefulness. Stories are written backwards, from result to reflection—leaving out the messy middle where most real learning happens. The platform subtly encourages us not just to do work, but to narrate it convincingly.
Is LinkedIn Still Effective for Jobs and Careers?
This raises a genuine and practical question:
Is LinkedIn still effective at what it was built for?
Do people actually find jobs through LinkedIn applications? Does messaging recruiters lead to honest conversations? Does networking translate into meaningful collaboration, or has it become a ritual we maintain because not being present feels riskier than questioning the system?
Many people scroll LinkedIn out of habit or obligation. Not because it adds clarity to their working lives, but because opportunity might appear—and disappearing from the platform feels like opting out of the modern professional world.
Interestingly, very few people describe LinkedIn as their favourite place on the internet. It’s rarely a source of joy, curiosity, or deep engagement. Instead, it functions as a space of cautious participation, where presence itself feels like a form of insurance.
Tool, Stage, or Something in Between?
I’m not complaining. It’s perhaps a curiosity for a platform I like to use.
LinkedIn may still work exceptionally well for specific industries, roles, and personalities. The signal may still exist—buried beneath layers of noise, repetition, and professional optimism. For some, visibility opens doors. For others, quiet competence does.
Or perhaps this evolution was inevitable.
When social media puts on a blazer, it doesn’t stop being social media. It simply learns a new language: ambition, gratitude, momentum, and perpetual readiness for the following announcement.
A Question Worth Asking, or maybe not.
So the question remains open:
Has LinkedIn genuinely helped your career, through a job, a client, or a meaningful connection?
Or are many of us simply playing along with a format that feels mandatory, hoping that usefulness will eventually emerge from visibility?
There may be no single answer. But asking the question itself might be the first step toward using the platform more intentionally, or deciding how much of ourselves it truly deserves.
I write about work, learning, and long-term thinking, especially for people building quietly in loud systems.
If this resonated with you, you might find something useful in my other essays.
