LinkedIn Is Everything Wrong With Society

LinkedIn is the worst social media

platform ever [music] made. You see,

maybe you're just searching for a job,

or you might just be trying to do some

networking. Whatever you're trying to

get out of it, LinkedIn is sure to

disappoint. [music] Trying to use it to

actually get a job is completely soul

crushing, especially for new graduates.

You've spent years on your education,

grinding away to eventually get

qualified for a good job. [music] Then

you can't find a job. No matter how hard

you try, you just get strung along by

multi-stage interviews and flaky

recruiters. [music]

That's where LinkedIn comes in. With its

monthly subscriptions and promises of a

way into the professional world, the

platform pres on the hopeful. You can

spend months or even years looking for a

job on the platform. Slowly losing your

savings and your sanity as the

neverending search drags on. The worst

part is it doesn't seem like there's an

alternative anymore. Today, the site is

full of empty corporate bragging, AI

written slop, and con artists. Making a

real connection with your connections is

very rare, but you've got to try and

deal with this all to try and break into

lots of industries. The site's full of

posts like this. This woman is making up

stories about how her LinkedIn follow

account finally won her daughter's

respect. All of that just to sell her

book and brag online. Millions of these

posts pollute the site every day, and

the people making them have no idea how

cringe-worthy they are. But

surprisingly, that's not the worst part

about LinkedIn. It isn't the scam

recruitment messages or the humble brags

or even the CEOs posting crying selfies

after firing people. The worst part is

that sooner or later, you're forced to

join in. In the corporate world, you're

massively missing out if you don't adopt

a fake persona. [music] Fill your

profile with inspirational quotes and

pretend that you live for the rat race.

If you don't dance the dance, then your

career could suffer. You might have

spent countless hours on the site

sending out applications and bashing

your head against the brick wall of the

modern jobs market, but unfortunately

for lots of people, it's unavoidable.

Today, LinkedIn is a key part of the

modern corporate workplace. The culture

on the platform is just a reflection of

what's going on in offices around the

world. But as we'll find out, it's also

played a role in creating that culture

in the first place. And it's all thanks

to a man named Reed Hoffman. Now,

Hoffman is up there with the biggest

names in tech. He lives and breathes

Silicon Valley. But unlike other tech

billionaires, Hoffman never relied on

his image to get ahead. Instead, people

knew him as the man with the

connections. In the wake of the dotcom

bubble in the early 2000s, he was the

guy everyone wanted to know in Silicon

Valley. If he saw potential in you or

your company, then he had 1,000 big

names he could introduce you to. A large

part of this was thanks to [music] his

prominent position at PayPal. People

always remember Elon Musk and Peter

Tilliel from the PayPal mafia, but it

was actually Hoffman pulling the strings

in the background. Tiel gets the credit

for being one of the first investors in

Facebook, for example. But it was

Hoffman who actually brokered the

meeting and introduced him to Mark

Zuckerberg. While all of this

contributed to his fortune, it wasn't

what made him who he is today. Instead,

Reed took his focus on connections and

turned it into a product. In the late

'9s, Hoffman had been involved with one

of the first social media networks

called socialet.com.

It failed, but the experience taught him

valuable lessons about virality and how

to get a platform off the ground. A few

years later, Hoffman was already rich on

PayPal money and had all the connections

in Silicon Valley he needed. But he saw

an opportunity. While other

entrepreneurs were busy messing around

with generic social networks, he was

going to create one for the corporate

world. When it launched in 2003,

LinkedIn was very simple. It was

basically a way for you to put your

resume online and connected to other

people. Hoffman wasn't even the first to

think of the idea, but his connections

and business sense meant he had the head

start he needed. He had a two-stage plan

for growth, which he later explained in

a 2014 interview with Sam Ultman. The

first part revolved around getting the

very first users on board. For this,

Hoffman could just use his growing

Silicon Valley connections. How did you

get the first million or even the first

[music] thousand users for LinkedIn?

>> So, first thousand was easy. We just

sent out invitations.

>> The site soon picked up momentum as

other big names in Silicon Valley

quickly joined in. But it still wasn't

nearly enough. Hoffman had to tap into a

very human fear that you're missing out.

He needed people to think that everyone

they knew was on the site, that they

would be left behind if they didn't join

in, that their careers would just be

overshadowed by everyone [music] else.

This was where stage two came in, mining

people's address books. The probably

[music] the key thing that we innovated,

and we were the first people to do this,

that then caused the growth curve to

change was upload your address book and

see who else you knew was in LinkedIn.

>> Hoffman is only showing people half the

picture here. He's leaving out how all

of this really worked. LinkedIn might

never have succeeded if they didn't

start pushing their own plug-in for

Outlook. It seemed simple to the first

users. It told them it would just take

all of their existing email contacts and

check if they were on LinkedIn. Then the

site would ask users if they wanted to

invite other people. It was deliberately

vague, making it seem like they could

already be on the site and that you were

just sending a friend request. Instead

though, people would accidentally send

out mass emails to the whole address

book inviting them all to LinkedIn. Even

though it did take around three emails

on average for someone to join the

platform, the sheer volume of

invitations was enough and LinkedIn grew

like a weed. Tactic worked and their

initial growth projections were

incredibly ambitious. But LinkedIn still

surpassed them by more than double.

Imagine how much better LinkedIn would

be today if it just still looked like an

address book. You wouldn't have to wade

through the knee high quagmire of scam

artists and useless posts. You could

just connect with the people you needed

to and get directly to the source. The

job market would be far simpler and you

wouldn't need to spend 40 hours a week

applying to jobs just to have a slim

chance. Things would still be hard, but

they would be a whole lot easier as

well. But to monetize his product as

much as he could, Hoffman had to go

beyond these societal constraints. He

had to push people's psychology further.

To do this, he hacked into the same fear

of missing out that the site had used to

grow, offering people who paid further

reach than the people who didn't. By

2005, just 2 years after launch,

LinkedIn then rolled out their inmail

service. For a monthly fee, people could

go beyond the people they had connected

with and send spam messages to tons more

people. They could even message people

over three degrees of separation away

from them. friends of friends of

friends. [snorts] Their press release

even admits that most of these messages

wouldn't get replies, but people still

ate it up anyway. And so this was the

beginning of LinkedIn's monetization.

Today, it's grown to astronomical

levels, $30 a month for individuals. The

way they sell it is telling, dangling

stats about how much more likely you are

to get a job. Really, if you have a job,

you don't need the subscription, so it's

in their interest to keep you searching.

Over time, LinkedIn would slowly create

higher tiers and more ways for people to

do this, adding in premium plus

accounts, business accounts, all sorts

of layers and artificial restrictions in

the way of what the site used to do for

free. It's just the classic startup

strategy. Start out with a good system

supported by investor cash, then make it

worse while squeezing the user base for

money once you've got them hooked.

LinkedIn grew fast, so Hoffman could

start this process quickly. first to a

thousand, then to a million, then

quickly to a 100 million users in the

space of a few years. But even at this

early stage, LinkedIn was already

starting to embrace ideas from other

social media platforms. In 2007, for

example, they began to build

infrastructure for people to upload

professional photos for their profiles.

It was a small and necessary step for

the site, but it still watered down the

initial goal of LinkedIn being solely

dedicated to making business

connections. [music]

Pictures of smiling professional people

helped create the impression that

LinkedIn was popular and worth joining

while slightly lowering the amount of

actually useful information on the site.

Later in 2012, LinkedIn pivoted away

from connections almost entirely. They

then began letting people follow other

accounts just like Twitter. At first, it

was just for a few select people like

big CEOs or politicians. They could also

make their own posts talking about

personal stories or their tips for

business or whatever else was on their

mind. But pretty soon, it extended to

everyone. [music] People were pushed

towards treating the site like a

sanitized corporate version of Twitter.

That same year, they also let people add

more pictures, videos, and other

personal branding onto their profiles.

The platform was now starting to look a

lot more like Instagram and Twitter. The

reasons were obvious. Like other

[snorts] social media sites, engagement

was king for LinkedIn, and they wanted

people spending as much time on the

platform as possible. This meant hiding

the old barebones professional parts of

the site, replacing it with more content

and visual elements instead. The

incentives of getting rewarded with

actual benefits like professional

connections and job offers quickly moved

onto the site itself. No longer was this

about getting rewarded with actual

benefits like professional connections

and job offers. Soon enough, it wasn't

just about chasing that key introduction

with an influential person like people

had done in real life. Rather, the

incentive was now about gathering likes

and followers and online clout. LinkedIn

had created a parallel dimension to the

workplace, a more liquid corporate world

where your false corporate persona

becomes your entire identity. In the

real world, you can only really humble,

brag, and sell yourself to the people

physically in front of you. And your

ability to do this is governed by social

convention. If you do it too much or too

obviously, people just see through it.

So, LinkedIn took that corporate

fakeness and turned it into a

competition. You could now create a

whole profile full of humble, bragging

stories and a list of your achievements

dressed up to sound as impressive as

possible. Whoever could rub their

success in other people's faces in the

most engaging way would get pushed to

the top of the algorithm. It's how you

can get posts like this after years of

this process. Gary doesn't see any

problems with bragging about how his

wife might leave him as he's completely

invested in the parallel world of

LinkedIn instead. And he's turned his

impending personal tragedy into just a

lesson for wannabe entrepreneurs.

LinkedIn fully intended on creating this

ecosystem. In 2015, they fully dove in,

adding a social media style content feed

they had borrowed from a startup they

bought a few years before. This was the

final nail in the coffin, and LinkedIn

has just never been the same since.

Before, LinkedIn had been about

enhancing the professional connections

you already had and extending your

reach. Over its first decades, though,

that completely changed. The idea became

for users to use online cloud to get the

job offers and the actual career

benefits. Whether that actually worked

though was another matter entirely.

LinkedIn still dangled the carrot of

career success in front of its users'

faces even after it became a pipe dream.

You could say that this was all just a

coincidence. There were clear reasons to

do all of this that any modern tech

company could recognize. Engagement

equals profit when you're running ads

and trying to get people to sign up to

monthly fees. Plus, LinkedIn users are

some of the most profitable users out

there. Lots of people are happy to spend

vast amounts of money as business

expenses. And LinkedIn charges massive

amounts for recruitment features. So why

not try and create an ecosystem full of

engaging content rather than just an

address book and a bunch of dry CVs? But

it wasn't just profit. Reed Hoffman knew

that changing and improving the very

nature of the workspace would make

LinkedIn an essential part of the modern

corporate world. What I'm most

interested in is how do we essentially

make products that make us much better

as a group, both better for us

individually and better for the system.

Reed had already tried to make a social

network and failed. But with LinkedIn,

he could slowly build the user base,

then add in the social media

infrastructure later on to squeeze even

more money out of it. Once it gained

momentum, it would achieve his goals of

improving people and changing them to

better fit into systems. What does that

really mean? Just take a look at how

LinkedIn has changed people and adapted

them for a corporate life. Today,

joining LinkedIn means joining the

corporate marketplace. But it isn't a

free market. The entire [music] platform

is designed to be as good for employees

as possible while also taking as much of

the power away from employees as

possible. Searching for a job on

LinkedIn is soul crushing because of how

it's set up. You might get tons of

messages at first, but 99% of them

aren't going to be relevant or

trustworthy. Instead, they'll be from

recruiters sending messages to thousands

of people. They might not be hiring for

your location. They might not be hiring

for your actual job title. It just

doesn't even matter. They only want

information and maybe to hack your

account if they're particularly

malicious. With all their money and

power over their own platform, LinkedIn

could easily crack down on this, but

they don't. Maybe because it increases

engagement and keeps people coming back

to the site to check their

notifications. Going the other direction

and applying to jobs yourself isn't

likely to work either. LinkedIn is full

of so-called ghost jobs. Job openings

that get advertised on the site but

aren't actually real. Lots of companies

want it to look like they're always

hiring. There are tons of benefits to

doing this. They have a continual steady

flow of applicants without really having

to do anything. If they ever get someone

vastly overqualified who doesn't know

their own worth, it pays for itself.

They might not even have a job opening.

They're just looking to see who's out

there. Today, the ghost job rate is at

30%, including on LinkedIn. In some

industries, it's double that. So,

depending on your job, over half of the

applications you spend days working on

aren't actually going anywhere. We're

not built to deal with these levels of

rejection, constantly banging your head

against the wall with no reward. But

going through this process better

conditions you for corporate life. Lots

of these problems aren't unique to

LinkedIn, though. They just make the

situation on the sides that much worse.

The real problem that LinkedIn creates

is based on what it rewards and how it

forces people to portray themselves.

Creating a good profile on LinkedIn is

much more similar to making [music] a

dating app profile than to writing a CV.

To stand out on the platform today, you

need to maximize the visual appeal.

People add insane job titles, dressing

up their actual experience to look

amazing with as many big corporate

buzzwords as possible. The amount of job

posts you make, the hashtags you

include, and the reach they have are far

more important now than your actual

achievements. Obviously, having good

realworld experience will still help,

but it doesn't matter nearly as much as

it used to. [music] Your profile will

likely get lost in the noise. That's

another problem. Just like dating apps,

you're [music] subtly competing with far

more people than you were before.

Recruiters are comparing your CV and

your profile to people across the world.

LinkedIn isn't going to restrict who

they see. The results are the same on

LinkedIn for employees as they are for

men on Tinder. The numbers just don't

add up, and there are far more employees

looking for jobs and men looking for

women. Just like with men on dating

apps, lots of people employ the shotgun

approach. They just send out thousands

of applications to whatever jobs they

can find, regardless of if they're

actually qualified. Suddenly, you're

trying to get heard and noticed even

though hundreds of people are sending in

applications at the same time as you.

Your application might be well

considered. You might be the best

candidates, but if you never actually

give your application any proper

thought, then it just doesn't matter.

Meanwhile, just like on Tinder, the

illusion of choice makes employers far

more picky. They wait for months or even

years for that dream candidate to come

along, ignoring all the real people who

try to apply. Through all this rejection

and all this useless work, people

looking for a job still have to keep up

this illusion. They have to pretend to

employees that they're happy and

positive and so incredibly excited to

work at such a fast-paced, innovative

company. It's just the same performance

that people have done in offices around

the world for years, but now LinkedIn

has made it a 247 process. Don't believe

me? People even have to keep up the

performance after they've lost their

jobs. Just have a look at some of these

posts made after Meta fired 11,000

employees in 2022. They'll talk about

how amazing Meta was despite just being

fired. They'll say how grateful they

were for their time at the company. They

might talk about the overwhelming

outpouring of support. Lots of them will

post pictures of their dog or their

children, another way that Instagram

culture has leaked in. They all read out

exactly the same way. And that's kind of

the point. It's all a performance

they're being forced to play out just to

advertise they're looking for a job

again. At the same time, companies

couldn't care less about how they fire

people. They'll lay off thousands with

pre-recorded video messages or emails.

Some employees have only found out after

their security keys stopped working on

the doors. This is the final effect of

LinkedIn and the reason why it's so

malicious to people's sense of

self-worth. Before being fired was the

opportunity to finally leave the

corporate performance behind. You could

let loose, take a deep breath, and for

at least a little while be yourself. But

today, you have to keep up the facade.

The show must go on, and you need to

make these kinds of posts, all while

having the knowledge that the terrible

process of the job hunt is waiting for

you around the corner. [music]

LinkedIn is only going to get worse. Now

AI has made the platform even more full

of spam. Anyone can get Chatty [music]

BT to write an emoji fililled post about

synergy in the workplace. And LinkedIn

will spread that slop to thousands of

people. Meanwhile, LinkedIn is hoovering

up all the posts and data to train their

own AI models, including all the

information you put on the site about

yourself. If you don't want that

happening, you need to leave now. Now,

you should do whatever it takes to

succeed, but at the same time, giving in

and going along with this modern

corporate performance isn't truly

necessary to keep yourself sane and to

keep some part of you alive. You can't

give yourself completely to the

corporate rat [music] race. Otherwise,

you might just end up actually believing

in all of this nonsense. [snorts]