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I used to get clients directly from LinkedIn. Posts would generate hundreds to a thousand views, a dozen or more comments, and real engagement from real people who turned into real business. I wrote over 300 professional profiles for LinkedIn Makeover, was trained directly by Donna Serdula who literally wrote LinkedIn Profile Optimization For Dummies, and I understood the platform as well as anyone. This was before Microsoft bought LinkedIn in 2016. The platform was different then.
That was five or more years ago. LinkedIn worked then. It does not work now, and the decline has been steady and brutal over the last two to three years. I have had to find entirely new ways to generate leads because the platform that used to deliver them reliably simply stopped.
LinkedIn sucks. I say that as someone who built part of a career on the platform, who wrote over 300 profiles for it, and who understood its mechanics as well as anyone outside of Microsoft. It sucks not because it was always bad, but because it used to be good and chose to become what it is now.
I am still on LinkedIn. I still use it. But what I use it for has fundamentally changed, and if you are depending on LinkedIn as your primary lead generation channel, this article is a warning.
What Changed
The feed became unusable. Open LinkedIn today and you will see sponsored ads, sponsored articles, math problems posted for engagement bait, humble brags disguised as lessons, and inspirational platitudes that say nothing. The content that gets rewarded by the algorithm is not the content that serves your audience. It is content engineered to generate reactions from strangers.
AI has made it dramatically worse. The platform is now flooded with AI-generated posts, AI-generated comments, and AI-generated articles that say nothing in the most polished way possible. People who never wrote a sentence in their careers are suddenly publishing daily thought leadership that reads like it was assembled by a committee of algorithms, because it was. The volume of content has exploded while the quality has cratered, and LinkedIn’s algorithm cannot tell the difference between a genuine insight from an experienced professional and a prompt-generated paragraph from someone who has never done the work. The result is a feed where everything sounds the same, nothing means anything, and the people with actual expertise are buried under a tsunami of empty, AI-polished noise.
This is the enshittification of LinkedIn. The term, coined by Cory Doctorow, describes the lifecycle of platforms that start by being good to their users, then abuse their users to be good to their business customers, then abuse their business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. LinkedIn followed this trajectory precisely. It started as a genuinely useful professional network where real connections led to real opportunities. Then it prioritized advertisers, flooding the feed with sponsored content and pay-to-play visibility. Now it extracts maximum revenue from everyone while delivering diminishing value to all of them. The users get a worse feed. The advertisers get lower engagement. LinkedIn gets the money. That is enshittification, and LinkedIn is a textbook case.
The organic reach collapsed. Posts that used to reach a thousand people now reach a hundred, and most of those hundred are people I already know personally. Reaching people I already know is not lead generation. It is talking to my existing contacts, which I can do through email without LinkedIn’s interference.
Fake engagement is everywhere. I receive two to three fake job offers per day from accounts that do not represent real companies. I get fake connection requests daily from profiles that are either bots or people running automated outreach sequences. The signal-to-noise ratio has deteriorated to the point where genuine engagement is buried under spam.
The feed is impossible to customize. I do not want LinkedIn’s news section. I do not want suggested posts from people I have never connected with. I do not want sponsored content mixed into my feed indistinguishably from real posts. LinkedIn does not let you control any of this through its own settings. I finally used custom rules in uBlock Origin to strip out the sections I did not want, which tells you everything about the state of the platform: I needed an ad blocker to make it usable.
You Can Still Make LinkedIn Work. The Question Is Whether You Should.
I am not saying LinkedIn is completely dead. You can make it work. Richard van der Blom publishes a 250-page book every year through AuthorUp detailing exactly how to optimize every aspect of your LinkedIn presence. Justin Welsh has built a following of hundreds of thousands and a multimillion-dollar business on the platform. Their systems work.
But here is the question nobody promoting LinkedIn strategies wants you to ask: why should you have to read a 250-page annual manual and spend weeks learning the current algorithm just to get people to see your posts?
Five years ago, you wrote something useful, posted it, and people saw it. Today, you need to understand posting times, hook formulas, comment velocity in the first fifteen minutes, carousel formats, engagement pod dynamics, and hundreds of other variables that change every time LinkedIn updates its algorithm. That is not a communication tool. That is a full-time job optimizing for a platform you do not own and cannot control.
If you enjoy that game, play it. Some people thrive on it. But if your goal is to reach potential clients and you are a writer, consultant, ghostwriter, author, or any other professional whose time is better spent on actual work, the return on investment no longer justifies the effort.
What LinkedIn Is Still Good For
I still use LinkedIn for two things.
First, the profile. My profile still generates occasional leads because it functions as a landing page. I rebuilt it using Justin Welsh’s layout principles: clear banner, professional headshot, specific tagline that says what I do and who I help, featured section linking to my services, and an about section loaded with social proof and client outcomes. When someone searches for a ghostwriter and finds my profile, the profile does the selling. That works independently of the feed.
Second, messaging. LinkedIn remains a functional messaging platform for reaching specific professionals. If I need to contact someone and I do not have their email, LinkedIn messages still get through. That utility has nothing to do with the feed, the algorithm, or content strategy.
Everything else — posting, articles, commenting for visibility, engagement strategies — produces diminishing returns that I can no longer justify with my time.
The Real Danger: Platform Dependence
The deeper lesson here is not about LinkedIn specifically. It is about depending on any platform you do not own.
I have known people who lost their LinkedIn accounts permanently. Not suspended. Gone. No explanation, no appeal, no recovery. Years of connections, recommendations, content, and professional history erased because a platform made a decision and there was no recourse. Some fought support for months and got their accounts back. Some did not.
This is not unique to LinkedIn. Facebook pages that businesses built their entire marketing around have had their reach throttled to near zero. Twitter accounts with large followings have been suspended or shadowbanned. Instagram algorithm changes have decimated engagement for creators who depended on the platform for income. TikTok faces potential bans in entire countries.
Every one of these platforms can change its algorithm, its policies, or its existence at any time, and you have zero control over any of it. Building your business on a platform you do not own is building on rented land. The landlord can change the terms whenever they want.
What to Do Instead
Own your channel. This means three things.
First, your website. Your website is the one piece of online real estate you control completely. The content you publish there belongs to you. The SEO value accrues to your domain. Nobody can throttle your reach, change your algorithm, or delete your account. My site, thewritingking.com, is where I publish the content that drives my business. Social media is a megaphone. The website is the building.
Second, your email list. An email list is the most valuable marketing asset a professional can own because it represents direct access to people who have chosen to hear from you. No algorithm stands between you and your subscribers. When you send an email, it arrives. The open rate may not be 100%, but it is dramatically higher than the percentage of your LinkedIn connections who will ever see a post you publish on that platform.
Third, use social media to amplify, not to depend. Social media platforms are tools for driving traffic to channels you own. Post on LinkedIn to direct people to your website. Use other platforms to grow your email list. But never make the platform itself the foundation of your business. The platform is the billboard. Your website and email list are the business.
The Traffic Proof
I am currently in the middle of a complete rebuild of the content on thewritingking.com. Over 300 articles cleaned up, rewritten, and connected to my actual services and expertise. The result so far has been a 1,200% increase in traffic, and Google has not even reindexed most of the rebuilt pages yet. That traffic increase came from improving owned content on my own site, not from any social media strategy.
That is the difference between owning your channel and renting someone else’s. When you invest in your website, the returns compound over time. When you invest in a social media platform, the returns depend on that platform’s current algorithm, which will change next quarter.
The Bottom Line
LinkedIn sucks as a lead generation tool. It is still useful as a profile and a messaging platform. The feed is a wasteland. The organic reach is a fraction of what it was. The effort required to make it work as a lead generation channel now exceeds the value it delivers for most professionals.
Own your channel. Build your website. Grow your email list. Use social media as a megaphone, not a foundation. And never build your business on a platform that can disappear or change its rules without asking your permission.
For professionals who want to establish authority through a book, ghostwriting produces a finished manuscript that lives on your shelf and in your audience’s hands permanently, not in a feed that refreshes and forgets. For writers building their own platform, my writing handbooks cover every element of craft. Start with a conversation.