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Thank you,
The LinkedIn Team

Actually, it’s been more than thirty days; I’ve shut down my LinkedIn account for several months.

About six or seven years ago, LinkedIn was a decent platform where you could connect with genuine “professionals.” But now it has completely changed. LinkedIn has become a chaotic, repulsive platform. Here’s what I’ve been seeing on LinkedIn in recent years:

• Inflammatory posts: Throwing out empty and extreme viewpoints, ending with an “Agree?” Yes, even if you said 1+1=3, I would say “Yes, you’re right.” These posts that are clearly designed to boost engagement are a major problem with algorithm-based social platforms today, and they’re difficult to effectively manage without human moderators.

• Inflated job titles: Just like the marketing gimmicks of “carefully selected,” “handmade,” “insistence” that are everywhere nowadays, in recent years there’s been a truckload of grandiose job titles popping up. But if you ask about their actual job responsibilities, it’s not at all what the title suggests. I now see these as red flags, especially for people with strange career paths.

• False experiences: I’ve seen more than once former colleagues listing things on their resumes that they never actually did. Early on, I made an app at a company, and then a former colleague put it on his resume, even though all he did was give me the Google Play account password—he never wrote a single line of code. What’s even funnier is that the app was so insignificant that it never even appeared on my own resume or portfolio. Go ahead and take it, LMAO.

• Misleading statements: This is the most malicious type. Some people take partial facts, reorganize them with language, and turn them into something completely different. Add a little water here, distort something there, and each part seems within the acceptable range of “packaging,” but accumulated together, they make a pig fly. And most people don’t have the time or ability to verify each fact, becoming accomplices to this bad trend.

• Career Pron: By this I mean many vague, high-sounding articles: “This should be done this way!” “That should be done that way!” And then people feel “Yes! Exactly! You get it!” These articles are basically social engineering, used to increase attention. I’m not so much against these articles—they can be stress-relieving, but they just don’t have much value.

• Recruiters’ little stories: “Today I met XXX candidate, he XXX, so I XXXX him.” I’m too tired to pick apart these little stories one by one. There are some professional recruiters whose names stay in my heart, even if they don’t post content or haven’t actually helped me find a job. And these unprofessional recruiters can almost be said to be the root cause of the toxic culture on this platform.

Besides the above, do you know what I hate the most? What I hate most is that under the overwhelming propaganda, many uninformed employers or HR departments treat LinkedIn as a standard requirement for job seekers, so you’re forced to join this terrible charade. Honestly, I really dislike the concept of “personal branding” that has become popular in recent years. Its original intention was good, but it has been distorted in practice. It was supposed to be about “showcasing your abilities and achievements,” but now it has turned into a fancy packaging competition.

I want to do something real. Something that truly makes me feel excited, joyful, fulfilled, and satisfied.