[ricardobeat]

We had one without the other. The “LinkedIn influencer” only came to existence in the past 5-6 years. Before that, 99% of people never browsed LinkedIn, you only ever used it to lookup other people and job search.

What made it turn into this cesspool, is the endless engagement optimization and pursuit of profit above all else.

[bbor]

I have to disagree, as HN's resident anti-Display-Ads evangelist: the problem is the display ads! Display ads mean influencers, and LinkedIn messed up specifically by paying influencers extra if they got people to click "See More", which is why people on LinkedIn:

Talk like this.

To increase engagement.

And take up space.

They've been trying to change their value-prop from "we manipulate people into buying stuff" to "we offer useful services for professionals" by selling Premium subscriptions, which seems to be going well but still far from done: Premium sales account for ~12% of their revenue, leaving a staggering $14B to "LinkedIn Marketing Solutions".

https://techcrunch.com/2025/01/29/linkedin-passes-2b-in-prem...

https://news.linkedin.com/2024/July/LinkedIn_Business_Highli...

[dwaltrip]

> LinkedIn messed up specifically by paying influencers extra if they got people to click "See More", which is why people on LinkedIn:

> Talk like this.

> To increase engagement.

> And take up space.

Ohhh that's why all the posts look like that? Barf. Goodhart's law strikes again...

[7thaccount]

I use LI a lot and noticed this trend and that any post that looked like that was garbage designed to create a lot of noise. They're easy to avoid now. It also helps as it is obvious when someone is a content troll as they're usually someone completely outside your network and talking about super generic things.

[glitchc]

Advertising eats everything: It's the currency of the business world.

[blackqueeriroh]

There’s an annoying reason advertising works - users don’t feel cost pressure as the company is forced to grow forever. Plus, people buy things, and ads work.

LinkedIn Premium struggles because it’s expensive as shit, and people will not pay that much for a social network most of the time, unless they have a dedicated reason to (job seeking, recruiting, etc.). We can say this is wrong and bad and it makes us the product, which is mostly true, but also it means we pay less for things with more utility.

Look at Netflix. Their ads tier is doing gangbusters. They keep increasing the amount of shows that are on that tier because it makes them more money, without users getting mad at price increases.

Now’s the hardest trick in the book is to provide high quality, contextual advertising in a way that doesn’t overwhelm your users but also creates value for your advertisers. Truthfully, nobody is better at this than Instagram.

If we actually want to solve this problem, the minimum wage needs to be radically reset, wages need to grow as fast or faster than inflation, and companies need to be incentivized by the market not to grow without bounds, but to reduce profit margins and find a healthy state where they throw off a solid amount of cash.

[lolinder]

> The “LinkedIn influencer” only came to existence in the past 5-6 years

The "influencer" in its modern incarnation is only 5-6 years old in general [0]. The culture has shifted dramatically and just creating a new platform isn't going to allow you to avoid the cultural shift.

[0] https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=%...

[morkalork]

What killed it was being able to link and share to content that isn't your own,as soon as you could do that, people repost dumb shit. I don't know how you would enforce rules around without killing linking and sharing entirely though. Proving you own a domain or github repo works for developers but that's not something the broader population knows or cares to do.