Once upon a time, LinkedIn knew exactly what it was.
A professional networking platform. Business-focused. Career-minded. A place to connect, recruit, share expertise, and perhaps quietly promote your latest promotion while pretending not to.
Now?
It increasingly feels like Facebook wearing a navy suit.
The shift has been gradual, but unmistakable.
Where once LinkedIn was about ideas, insight and intelligent conversation, it now often resembles a digital open-plan office where everyone is talking at once.
Heartfelt confessions.
Tearful resilience stories.
‘How my seven-year-old taught me leadership.’
Self-appointed gurus selling growth.
Videos filmed in car parks.
And endless posts that begin:
“I wasn’t going to share this, but…”
They were absolutely going to share it.
This is not to dismiss authenticity. Personality matters. People buy people. Stories connect.
But there is a difference between authentic professional storytelling and performance.
LinkedIn’s evolution into a creator platform has changed the atmosphere dramatically. The algorithm rewards engagement. Comments matter. Reactions matter. Time spent matters. Which means content increasingly chases response rather than substance.
That creates a problem.
Professionals who once came to LinkedIn to learn, network or quietly build their reputation are now faced with a feed that often feels noisy, self-conscious and oddly exhausting.
The irony?
LinkedIn says it wants expertise.
And yet many users feel expertise is precisely what gets drowned out.
There is also a sameness creeping in.
The same formatting tricks.
The same faux vulnerability.
The same “lessons learned.”
The same breathless declarations of transformation.
It can all feel terribly manufactured.
For genuine writers, consultants, publishers, communicators and business professionals, this creates an awkward dilemma.
Do you stay serious and risk invisibility?
Or join the performance?
That may be why engagement frustrations are growing.
Not because LinkedIn is dead.
Not because it has failed.
But because its identity feels muddled.
It wants to be a trusted professional network.
It also wants to be a creator economy platform.
Those two things do not always sit comfortably together.
And perhaps that is the real question.
Maybe LinkedIn has not lost its mojo.
But has it lost clarity about what it actually wants to be?
