Posts I wrote on LinkedIn used to generate hundreds to a thousand views, a dozen or more comments, and real engagement from real people. I wrote over 100 professional profiles for LinkedIn Makeover. Donna Serdula trained me directly, and she wrote LinkedIn Profile Optimization For Dummies. I understood the platform as well as anyone. This was before Microsoft bought LinkedIn in 2016. The platform was different then. For more, see why platform dependence is a trap. That was five or more years ago.
LinkedIn worked then. It doesn’t work now, and the decline has been steady and brutal over the last two to three years. I’ve had to find entirely new ways to generate leads because the platform that used to deliver them reliably simply stopped.
I know what the platform could do because I watched it do it. I promoted Focus on LinkedIn hard there, priced it at 99 cents, and it sold 15,000 copies in three days. A lot of people liked it. I don’t believe the same launch would get anywhere near that reach on today’s feed, since the thing which made it possible was dismantled on purpose, a dumb move.
LinkedIn sucks. I say that as someone who built part of a career on the platform. I wrote over 100 profiles for it, and I understood its mechanics as well as anyone outside Microsoft. It sucks because it used to be good and chose to become what it is now.
I’m still on LinkedIn. I still use it. But what I use it for has changed, and if you’re depending on LinkedIn as your primary lead generation channel, this article is a warning.
What Changed on LinkedIn?
The LinkedIn lead funnel. Figures invented, the empty inbox is not.
The content the algorithm rewards isn’t the content that serves your audience.Share on X
The feed became unusable. Open LinkedIn today and here’s the feed. Sponsored ads. Sponsored articles. Math problems posted as engagement bait. Humble brags disguised as lessons. Inspirational platitudes that say nothing.
The algorithm rewards content engineered to get reactions from strangers, and your actual audience pays the price for it. I’m tired of watching capable professionals teach themselves to write bait because bait is the only thing the feed will show.
For more, see LinkedIn for authors and reasons why TikTok sucks.
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 a committee of algorithms assembled it, because one did. The volume of content has exploded while the quality cratered. For a while LinkedIn was encouraging this and handing people the tools to do it: make this post with AI, make a comment with AI. I think they still do, and my reaction is what the fuck?
LinkedIn’s algorithm can’t tell a real insight from an experienced professional apart from a prompt-generated paragraph by someone who has never done the work.
The result is a feed where everything sounds the same and nothing means anything. The people with real expertise are buried under a tsunami of empty, AI-polished noise. This is the enshittification of LinkedIn.
LinkedIn’s algorithm can’t tell a real insight from an experienced professional apart from a prompt-generated paragraph by someone who has never done the work.
Cory Doctorow coined the term. It describes the lifecycle of a platform. First it’s good to its users. Then it abuses its users to be good to its business customers. Then it abuses the business customers to claw back all the value for itself. LinkedIn followed this trajectory exactly. It started as a 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’s 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 doesn’t generate leads, and I can talk to my existing contacts through email without LinkedIn’s interference. LinkedIn isn’t interested in promoting you unless you buy ads. Users are leaving, and the company is still making billions.
Fake engagement is everywhere. I receive two to three fake job offers per day from accounts that don’t 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 real engagement is buried under spam. Then there are the vendors pitching lead generation. We’ll get you leads, they say. I don’t need leads somebody trawled off the internet by scraping sites. I need people who convert.
Matt Hawksley, who coaches people through career reinvention, summed up the lead-generation pitch better than I can: “You can get a million leads, but if they’re all crap, what’s the point?” He said it on Leaders and Their Stories, and it’s the question every automated outreach vendor hopes you never ask.
The feed is impossible to customize. I don’t want LinkedIn’s news section. I don’t want suggested posts from people I’ve never connected with. I don’t want sponsored content mixed into my feed indistinguishably from real posts. LinkedIn doesn’t let you control any of this through its own settings. InMail I can at least turn off, and I do. As of 2024, every InMail I’d ever received was a sales pitch. Not one said “Hi, how are you doing?” They all came down to “What can I do for you? I want your money.”
I finally used custom rules in uBlock Origin to strip out the sections I didn’t want. That tells you everything about the state of the platform. I needed an ad blocker to make it usable.
Watch: LinkedIn's 2026 Algorithm Explained (Why Your Reach Dropped), Elmer Lopez
You Can Still Make LinkedIn Work. The Question Is Whether You Should.
LinkedIn isn’t 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.
Nobody promoting LinkedIn strategies wants you to ask why you should need a 250-page annual manual and weeks of study on the current algorithm just to get people to see your posts. I think that question answers itself, and the answer doesn’t flatter LinkedIn.
Five years ago, you wrote something useful, posted it, and people saw it. Today you need posting times, hook formulas, comment velocity in the first fifteen minutes, carousel formats, and engagement pod dynamics. Add hundreds of other variables that change every time LinkedIn updates the algorithm. That’s a full-time job optimizing for a platform you don’t own and can’t control.
If you enjoy that game, play it. Some people thrive on it. But if your goal is reaching potential clients, and you’re a writer, consultant, ghostwriter, author, or any professional whose time is better spent on the work itself, the return no longer justifies the effort. I’ve never boosted a post myself. It’s expensive, and I’m not trained in ads, so I figured I’d just be throwing money down the toilet, and I’m not fond of doing that. To me, boosted posts are entertaining, but wasteful.
What Is LinkedIn Still Good For?
I still use LinkedIn for two things.
First, the profile. My profile still generates occasional leads because it works as a landing page. I rebuilt it on Justin Welsh’s layout principles. Clear banner. Professional headshot. A specific tagline saying what I do and who I help. A featured section linking to my services. 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 don’t have their email, LinkedIn messages still get through. That utility has nothing to do with the feed, the algorithm, or content strategy. Everything else, the posting, the articles, the commenting for visibility, the engagement strategies, produces diminishing returns I can’t justify with my time anymore.
The value of LinkedIn has dropped dramatically for me, and these days I use it mostly as a messaging platform. Even that part is bad. Its message function is one of the worst email-type systems I’ve ever seen in my entire life, next to Facebook’s. I can’t believe somebody sat down, designed that and thought it was good.
Why is depending on LinkedIn dangerous?
The deeper lesson here’s not about LinkedIn. It’s about depending on any platform you don’t own. I’ve known people who lost their LinkedIn accounts permanently. Not suspended. Gone. No explanation, no appeal, no recovery. For more on getting leads the right way on LinkedIn, see Richard’s interview with Mike O’Neil. 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 didn’t.
In 2024 I spent about nine months failing LinkedIn’s identity verification. It ran through a third-party identity service, and one formatting difference, like a phone number without the +1, got me rejected and locked out for a month each time. It was supposed to be a simple process. I finally got verified by taking “Jr.” off my name. The process may have changed since.
This isn’t 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. A business on a platform you don’t own is built on rented land. The landlord can change the terms whenever they want.
What should you do instead of relying on LinkedIn?
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 won’t be 100%. It’s still far higher than the share of your LinkedIn connections who will ever see a post you publish there.
Third, use social media to amplify. 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. Back in November 2024 I set up a plugin that automatically posts my hundreds of articles to X and Facebook, so the archive works as an engine, and those posts were getting traction. I keep LinkedIn out of it, because LinkedIn restricts accounts that use unauthorized automation tools.
| Channel | What it’s for | Who controls it |
|---|---|---|
| Your website | The building: content and SEO value accrue to your domain | You, completely |
| Your email list | Direct access to people who chose to hear from you | You, with no algorithm in between |
| Social media | The megaphone: drive traffic to channels you own | The platform |
| LinkedIn profile | A landing page that still brings occasional leads | |
| LinkedIn messaging | Reaching someone whose email you don’t have | |
| LinkedIn feed | Diminishing returns as organic reach collapsed | LinkedIn’s algorithm |
The Traffic Proof
I’m 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 hasn’t even reindexed most of the rebuilt pages yet. That traffic increase came from improving owned content on my own site.
That’s 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. That will change next quarter.
Is LinkedIn still worth an author’s time?
LinkedIn sucks as a lead generation tool. It’s 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.
I’d tell any professional what I tell myself. Put your work on a website you own and an email list nobody can throttle, and use social media to point people back home. Too many good people are still pouring years into a platform that can erase them without a word, and LinkedIn will keep taking that effort for as long as they keep handing it over.
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. For writers building their own platform, my writing handbooks cover every element of craft. Start with a conversation.
My take
LinkedIn stopped working, and I don’t expect it back. Posts that once pulled hundreds of views now go nowhere, and the platform can erase years of effort without a word. Keep a profile there and treat it as a signpost. Put your real work on a website you own, build an email list nobody can throttle, and point people home from every post. Own the ground you stand on.
LinkedIn FAQ
The book on this: Focus on LinkedIn is 276 pages on making the platform work anyway, written from a hundred-plus profile rebuilds and the parts that still produce results.
Relationships that hold do not depend on any platform, and this book is about building them. I wrote it as an introverted computer guy who learned the hard way that nobody was there to call.
- Microsoft completes acquisition of LinkedIn, LinkedIn Corporate Communications
- Enshittification: The 2023 Digital Word of the Year, Verso Books
- LinkedIn Profile Optimization For Dummies, 2nd Edition, O’Reilly Media (For Dummies / Wiley)
