Delete LinkedIn Forever

I decided to delete my LinkedIn forever. It had already been hibernating for about 5 months, so I figured I don’t need it anymore. At first, I was worried. What if I lose my job?

Luckily for me, I could already think back to the time I lost a professional job. LinkedIn was of little value to me during my jobless period.

The jobs I applied to weren’t responding, and the hiring managers I was reaching out to weren’t replying. Maybe that was due to externalities, some of them outside my control.

I highly doubt it.

My last 4 professional jobs were all found through word-of-mouth networking or Indeed. So, since I created my LinkedIn account in 2018, it has gotten me zero jobs, zero side gigs.

The AI Takeover

With the influx of AI generative posts across all social media, the writing was on the wall for LinkedIn.

When you make your social media platform attractive to the most vain, predatory people out there, it should be a surprise to no one that ‘AI slop’ now fills the feeds of LinkedIn.

AI-generated content is low-cost, low-effort, and more importantly, it requires little thinking. That makes it ideal for a platform like LinkedIn, where users value the convenience and precieved benefit of automated posting over actual social interaction.

The Illusion

The biggest hurdle to clicking ‘delete’ is the FOMO.

We believe that if you aren’t on LinkedIn, you don’t exist as a professional.

In reality, people do business with people they actually know and trust. They do not do business with a optimized profile sleeping under a mountain of garbage.

Real Connections

A casual conversation with a former coworker or a direct application on a dedicated job board yields more tangible outcomes than sending fifty cold connection requests into a void of automated replies.

I am done participating in the theater. If a future employer or connection (or perhaps, an old lover?) really wants to find me, they can do it the old-fashioned way.