LinkedIn is the world’s largest professional network with over 722 million users worldwide. It is designed to connect professionals, help job seekers find new opportunities, allow businesses to post jobs and find candidates, and enable users to share content and build their personal brand. However, despite its popularity and ubiquity, LinkedIn has developed some issues over the years that have made many users frustrated or dissatisfied with the platform. In this article, we will explore some of the main problems with LinkedIn in its current state and analyze what could be improved.
Too much self-promotion and spam
One of the biggest complaints about LinkedIn is the amount of self-promotion and spammy content that fills up users’ feeds. While some self-promotion is to be expected on a platform for professional networking, the extent to which some users share content solely to market themselves or their companies has gotten out of hand. LinkedIn feeds are clogged with shallow blog posts, ebooks, and repetitive updates from those who seem to be using it as just another social media platform to build their brand, rather than as a place for meaningful professional connections. This makes it difficult to find and engage with more substantive, worthwhile content.
Recruitment messaging can be aggressive and invasive
LinkedIn’s recruiting features aim to help matchmake between job seekers and employers, but some recruiters and talent acquisition professionals abuse these messaging options and send overly assertive outreaches. Job seekers complain of getting barraged by recruiters with irrelevant opportunities and finding it difficult to stop the flood of messages. Recruiters, under pressure to fill roles, resort to sending mass template messages or trying to connect with anyone and everyone regardless of their actual qualification. This recruiter spam contributes to the sense of a platform overrun with shallow, low-quality interaction.
Too much focus on vanity metrics like connections or profile views
With its roots as a social network, LinkedIn incorporates vanity metrics common to social media platforms, such as number of connections or profile views. However, this can skew users’ perception of meaningful engagement on the site. Simply accumulating connections does not indicate beneficial professional relationships; most LinkedIn users have networks of connections with whom they have little to no actual interaction. Likewise, profile views or badges like “top voices” may boost egos but mean little in terms of demonstrating skill or authority in an industry. The focus on these vanity metrics could distract from more important causes for being active on LinkedIn, like sharing substantive content or building authentic professional connections through interaction.
Ads and sponsored content overwhelm the organic user experience
As LinkedIn has grown, its increasing ad revenue and paid products threaten to complicate the user experience. Paid partnerships, sponsored content, Premium subscriptions, etc. may keep LinkedIn profitable but also clutter users’ feeds and divert attention. The average user certainly understands that ads are to be expected; however, many feel LinkedIn has become overrun by various money-making components that weren’t part of the original, simpler value proposition of the platform. Finding and engaging with organic content can be surprisingly difficult amidst all the promotional posts.
Abundance of fake profiles or bot/spam accounts
Authenticity is crucial for any professional networking platform, so the existence of bot accounts, spam profiles, and other fakes or inauthentic users damages the integrity of LinkedIn. These types of accounts often have telltale signals like few connections, stolen profile photos, or content focused solely on driving clicks, traffic, or follows rather than delivering value. By allowing these fake accounts to proliferate, LinkedIn neglects a core responsibility of any social platform to maintain standards and verify real users. This also contributes to users’ cynicism and distrust when viewing profiles or interacting on LinkedIn.
Interface and algorithms are less than optimal for user needs
Some design choices in LinkedIn’s interface and algorithms do not necessarily have the average user’s needs or preferences in mind. For example, their algorithms highlighting or curating content in users’ feeds often seem misaligned with what that specific user really finds useful or interesting. Interface changes like the messaging system overhaul or the newsfeed redesign received significant user backlash for overcomplicating previously simple interactions. These types of moves away from the basic utilities that users want indicate how LinkedIn may be trying to serve multiple stakeholders rather than keeping its core user experience clean and user-centric.
Why Has LinkedIn Changed?
These issues plaguing the average LinkedIn user stem in large part from the platform’s need to balance various priorities as it has evolved over the years from scrappy startup to major public company (it was acquired by Microsoft in 2016 for $26 billion). LinkedIn has shifted its focus in order to satisfy different parties, leading to decisions that may disregard or frustrate users.
Appealing to investors and shareholders
Once LinkedIn went public in 2011, it began answering to Wall Street and shareholders seeking quarterly growth and profits. This profit motive has led LinkedIn to introduce more ads, sponsored content, and premium subscription products so that the platform monetizes its massive user base. While businesses must make money, this corporate pressure has contributed to cluttering up the user experience and shifting attention away from offering a purely valuable networking tool.
Monetizing business solutions offerings
B2B services became a priority growth area for LinkedIn and now encompass Talent Solutions, Marketing Solutions, Sales Solutions, and Learning Solutions. These enterprise offerings go far beyond the original premise of connecting professionals and represent massive revenue potential. Therefore, LinkedIn focuses energy on gaining corporate clients for these business products even if they aren’t highly relevant to the average individual user.
Competing with other social networks
Though firmly established as the professional social network, LinkedIn faces indirect competition from other social platforms that hold users’ attention like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, etc. LinkedIn aims to boost user engagement partially by incorporating some of the same features like multimedia posts, Stories, Hashtags, etc. However, this risks diluting LinkedIn’s unique value and alienating users who came for simpler professional networking.
Trying to grow user base
LinkedIn’s priority is to keep expanding its member base by attracting and retaining as many users as possible. Various product decisions stem from this need for continual growth, whether that means more notification emails, mobile app pushes, or other engagement driving measures. While growth is positive, this again may distract from enhancing basic utilities to serve loyal long-term members. User satisfaction seems secondary to user volume.
Personal branding and passive content consumption
Influencers, thought leaders, and personal brands have flocked to LinkedIn as an authoritative platform to build their followings. LinkedIn wants to encourage this kind of user-generated content and these prominent voices to continually add value. However, this steady stream of posts also plays a role in turning LinkedIn into a passive reading platform rather than a truly interactive network for professionals.
The Future of LinkedIn
It is unlikely LinkedIn will abandon the various business models and priorities that have shifted focus away from the core user experience; the platform is too massive and entrenched now to radically change course. However, certain product changes or new strategies could help LinkedIn prove it still values its community and the original purpose of professional networking:
Add more social accountability for activity
Implement more mechanisms requiring accountability for engagement, not just passive content consumption. For example, require comments or likes in order to share articles publicly or introduce forums where users must contribute original commentary.
Give users granular content controls
Provide more robust preferences or personalization around feed content – users should be able to hide content from specific connections, block entire post categories, favorite/follow only certain companies or Influencers, etc.
Enhance search and filter capabilities
Improve search to better index quality content and let users filter out self-promotional posts, ads, recruiters, etc. so organic professional engagement emerges.
Verify profiles and restrict suspicious activity
Introduce better processes to verify real profiles, restrict suspicious activity like bots or scrapers, and remove fraudulent users to restore authenticity.
Highlight job opportunities personalized for each user
Leverage profile data and machine learning to showcase open roles truly relevant for each user instead of letting generic recruiter outreach blanket the platform.
Add multimedia options more conducive to professional networking
Move beyond basic text, images, and articles by enabling short video introductions, podcast channels, skill assessments, video conferencing, etc.
Reduce commercial pressures and focus on core experience
Consider measures to refocus the platform on user needs first, whether that means reducing ads, making premium subscriptions optional rather than essential, or scaling back on algorithms that prioritize “engagement” over usefulness.
Conclusion
In summary, LinkedIn was founded to help professionals connect, find opportunities, share knowledge, and build reputations. However, in recent years, increased promotional content, invasive outreach, vanity metrics, bombarding ads, and questionable user authenticity have degraded the experience. LinkedIn’s evolution from startup to public company now serving various stakeholders has led it to lose sight of simply delivering value for individual users. While some detriments are hard to reverse, LinkedIn could still take steps to improve trust and transparency, refine algorithms and interfaces for user benefit, and ultimately help recenter the platform on what made it essential in the first place – authentic professional networking.