By Jolly Authority for Oblivion

Introduction

LinkedIn insists on calling itself a “professional network.”
That word—network—is doing an impressive amount of unpaid labor.

A real network connects people to opportunity, routes information efficiently, and builds trust over time. LinkedIn does none of that anymore. What it operates instead is a content treadmill wrapped in résumé cosplay, optimized for engagement metrics that have little to do with work, hiring, or professional value.

This is not a revelation. It’s simply overdue to be stated clearly and placed on the record.

It Doesn’t Connect People Who Can Actually Help Each Other

If you are looking for work, LinkedIn does not surface decision-makers.
If you are hiring, it does not surface competence.

What it reliably surfaces is activity: posts from the already-employed congratulating one another in public while actual conversations happen elsewhere—email, Slack, text, or over coffee. That is not networking. It is professional theater, performed for an algorithm.

Visibility Has Replaced Value

LinkedIn rewards tone-policed inspiration, recycled hustle slogans, and algorithm-friendly confessionals. Meanwhile, professionals with experience, judgment, and uncomfortable truths are quietly buried for failing to package insight as motivation.

If insight mattered on this platform, the feed would look very different.

The Platform Is Structurally Hostile to Honesty

Write plainly about layoffs, age discrimination, chronic illness, burnout, or how hiring actually works and engagement collapses. LinkedIn does not want accuracy—it wants brand-safe optimism.

The result is a place where everyone publicly pretends things are improving while privately admitting they are not.

LinkedIn Protects Systems, Not People

Recruiters ghost without consequence.
Companies post jobs they never intend to fill.
“Open to work” functions as a quiet mark of professional vulnerability.

None of this is accidental. The platform benefits from churn, anxiety, and false hope. Fixing these problems would reduce engagement—and engagement is the only thing LinkedIn is designed to protect.

There Is No Memory, and No Accountability

Bad actors face no penalty. Good writing disappears in days. Careers are flattened into buzzwords and bullet points, stripped of context or continuity.

There is no durable archive, no institutional learning, and no sense that participation builds toward anything lasting. It is all scroll, no spine.

Final Note for the Record

Yes, it has already been established that LinkedIn is not a network by any recognized standard. This is the rest of the bill of particulars.

If LinkedIn were serious, it would fix this.

It would privilege expertise over engagement bait.
It would design for trust instead of dopamine.
It would connect workers to power instead of trapping them in performative optimism.

It won’t—because the current system works just fine for the platform, even as it delivers diminishing value to nearly everyone else.

So let this stand for the permanent record.

If LinkedIn wants to remain relevant, it needs to stop congratulating itself and start doing the unglamorous work of serving professionals. Otherwise, it is headed exactly where empty malls and dead forums go: a place people still pass through, but no longer believe in.

Fix your shit—or accept that you’ve become a very expensive illusion.