Why bother with LinkedIn?

I see a handful of types of posts on LinkedIn listed below in roughly most often to least.

  1. Information about a product/service/”thought leader-y” (whether it’s being sold or not)
  2. AI doom / AI hype
  3. Policing how others use LI or telling others how to do their jobs
  4. Trending posts (Coldplay concert, create an action figure of yourself, year wrapped, current one is asking AI if I should walk to the carwash, that kind of thing)
  5. Rage/clickbait (some of this is funny to me, when people intentionally wrongly name famous people or characters)
  6. Other

A note, I’ve posted a lot of product/service/”thought leader-y” type posts (this post might fall into that category, you be the judge). If you write in any or all of the other categories, great for you, do whatever makes you happy. I’m not saying how you should use LI.

But why do I go back to LI again and again?

Instead of thinking of LI as a platform, who are the people that post what I consistently find interesting?

Cedric Chin highlights stuff he’s posted on his blog, he has permanently changed the way I think for the better.

Jillian Richardson, Louis Butterfield and Tom Zehentner are the closest I get to weird LinkedIn, but I’ve also had conversations with them. It feels like they’re not being weird to be weird. Often I laugh or smile when reading them.

Alex Boyd posts thoughtful comments and takes on current events related to his work and what’s going well with his holding company.

Patrick Black posts literal explosions and I’ll hit like on every single post of his I see, but it’s the conversation underneath that’s interesting.

Jordan Crawford and Mike Haimowitz are comment machines and the important bit is that they care a lot about what they’re saying. I have the strong suspicion that neither automate their use of LI.

One thing I notice is that these people are in sales or are content creators full time. They’re good at it. What you can’t see from the list is that I spend more time reading their comment conversations than their content.

I spent some time reflecting and wish there were more construction folks on this list; that’s my industry. I want to be involved with it, but I don’t see a ton of thoughtful reflection here, on this platform. It may be a function of how online people are or a fact of the industry itself.