Why LinkedIn feels the way it does now
People want to feel important, find community, and stay employable. AI has made it much easier to turn those needs into a constant stream of posts.
I think LinkedIn makes more sense when you look at what people need from it right now. They want work, reassurance that they still matter, and some contact with other people who understand what is happening to their careers. AI has made posting much easier, so a lot more of those needs are being expressed through content.
That does not make the content good. It does make the feed a little easier to understand.
People want to feel important
Most people want to feel that their experience matters and that someone is interested in what they have to say. Work gives a lot of us a fairly structured way to get that feeling. We have a title, responsibilities, people who ask for our judgment, and some evidence that we are useful.
LinkedIn lets us extend that beyond the people we actually work with. Something happens at work, we turn it into a lesson, and people respond. Sometimes we have something useful to share. Sometimes we mostly want other people to recognize that we are thoughtful, capable, or successful.
I don't think that is a particularly surprising or shameful thing to want. I do think it explains why so many posts seem to have a second purpose underneath whatever they are ostensibly about. The layoff post also needs to establish resilience. The disagreement needs to establish leadership. A relatively ordinary experience becomes evidence of an unusual capacity for insight.
It can feel exhausting to read when every experience has to demonstrate something admirable about the person having it. I also understand why people do it. Being seen feels good, especially when you are not getting much of that elsewhere.
It is much easier to get from a thought to a response now
There used to be more effort between wanting to post and having something ready to publish. You had to decide what you meant, write it, and tolerate the possibility that it sounded awkward. That effort probably stopped a fair amount of posting.
Now you can give an AI a vague thought and get back a polished post in seconds. You can ask it to make you sound more insightful, more authoritative, or more like the people whose posts seem to do well. Then you publish it and wait for a response.
I use AI to help me write too. The part I find concerning is how easy it has become to repeat the whole process without doing much additional thinking. If the response feels good, there is very little stopping you from doing it again tomorrow.
A post does not have to be especially useful to give its author something they wanted. A few likes, a flattering comment, or a notification from someone they respect might be enough. Multiply that by a large number of people and you get a feed with a lot of activity and relatively little new information.
People are looking for community too
I think some of what looks like empty engagement is people trying to have a social interaction in a place where they still feel entitled to initiate one.
You can comment on a former colleague's post without explaining why you have not spoken in three years. You can congratulate someone, agree with them, or share a similar experience. There is a reason for the interaction already built into the platform.
That matters when people are lonely, working remotely, out of work, or generally having a difficult time. A professional network may be one of the few places where they still have a large group of recognizable people around them. Posting gives those people an opportunity to respond.
The result can be repetitive and strangely intimate for a website where everyone has their job title attached to their face. I still think there is something human underneath it. People want to know that someone is there.
People are scared about whether they will be able to find work
There is also a much more practical reason to keep posting. People are worried about being employable, and visibility feels like something they can do about it.
You cannot make a company open a role or persuade a hiring team to stop changing its requirements. You can publish something that reminds your network you exist. You can try to demonstrate that you understand AI, that you have an informed view of your industry, or that your experience is still relevant.
Once you start thinking of your online presence as part of your ability to find work, silence can begin to feel risky. Other people are posting. They seem engaged and current. You do not know whether it is helping them, but you also do not want to discover later that you should have been doing it.
That creates a fairly strong incentive to keep producing, even when you do not have much you want to say. AI makes it easier to meet that obligation. The feed fills up with people trying to reassure potential employers, their peers, and probably themselves.
Understanding it does not make it more useful to read
I find LinkedIn frustrating because so much of it asks for my attention without giving me much in return. There are useful ideas and people there, but finding them can involve reading a lot of posts that seem to exist primarily because someone felt they needed to post.
I don't think the explanation is simply that everyone became more vain or less interesting. The same platform is being used to look for work, maintain a reputation, find community, and feel good for a few minutes. Those needs are overlapping at a time when producing something publishable has become almost effortless.
People can get something meaningful from participating while collectively making the feed less useful. I think that is a large part of why LinkedIn feels the way it does now.