It's Not Just You. Linkedin Has Gotten Really Weird.

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By Rob Price – You can find this article in its entirety HERE on Business Insider’s website.

It was a hard day for Matthew Sciannella: He was officially getting divorced.

After 12 years of marriage and multiple children, he and his wife had drifted apart during the pandemic. In early 2021, they decided to call it quits. As the Washington, DC-area marketing executive grappled with the realities of being suddenly single again, he told his friends, he journaled about it, and he told his family. And then he told LinkedIn.

“I’m getting a divorce. God it sucks to write that,” Sciannella shared with his several thousand professional connections.

He explained why he’d decided to publicize his news on the work-focused social network. “This is a human network for me now. A place where I feel most myself. Most at home. And most among my peers,” he wrote. “We all build our professional castles here on LinkedIn, but real life shit happens, too.”

Over the past year, remote work across the world had blurred the lines between work and life. Sciannella’s post touched a nerve. It accrued thousands of reactions and hundreds of comments. “Let it out brother,” a growth advisor wrote. “Fuck the ROI conversations right now and focus on your family.”

Then the backlash began. Other commenters started criticizing his decision to share so openly with his colleagues, clients, and potential future employers. And a meme account on Instagram, @BestOfLinkedIn, screenshotted and mocked his post to its tens of thousands of followers. It wrote: “Maybe this wouldn’t have happened if you didn’t share every detail of your personal life on a professional networking platform?”

It was the start of a madcap workplace drama that laid bare an awkward truth: No one really knows what it means to be “professional” anymore.

With 950 million members as of July, LinkedIn is poised to soon have a billion users, joining a rarefied three-comma club with the likes of Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok. Started in 2003 as little more than an online repository for résumés, the Microsoft-owned behemoth has recently transformed. Not only are there more users to post, but they’re posting much more often. The number of LinkedIn posts grew 41% from 2021 to 2023. But it’s the content of the posts that’s shifted the most, turning LinkedIn into one of the world’s strangest social networks.

Take one post from Peter Rota, an SEO specialist from Massachusetts. “I have a secret,” he wrote to his thousands of followers in August 2022. “Most people are not even aware this is a real thing. Since 2015, I have struggled with peeing in public restrooms.”

Rota went on to explain that his social-anxiety condition, also known as shy-bladder syndrome, had caused years of discomfort, and even provoked him to miss friends’ weddings. He had a blowout trip planned to tour Europe with friends, he wrote, and was seriously considering not going.

So why post it? “I had basically seen other people, I guess, share more vulnerable things, so to speak — and I feel like it’s kind of just something that I wanted to share,” he told me. Over the past couple of years, he’d seen and taken part in a pivot toward personal sharing on LinkedIn, and saw posting about his condition as a way to both confront his demons and help with the condition for others. “I feel like sometimes it just helps other people to know that it’s possible to do something,” he added.

Personal sharing on LinkedIn is booming, people who use the platform say, because of tidal shifts in both social norms and the social-media marketplace.

For one, broad cultural attitudes toward the workplace, as well as what’s appropriate to share, are evolving. This is partly driven by the coronavirus pandemic: People were suddenly given free rein to be vulnerable and express their fears in front of their colleagues, while remote work simultaneously lowered inhibitions and eroded much of in-office etiquette.

There’s also a generational shift, with some younger people having fewer hang-ups sharing with their colleagues. Oversharing comes “pretty much down to Gen Z, to be honest with you,” said Catalina Valentino, a 21-year-old entrepreneur. She found some notoriety from Davos earlier this year when she posted on LinkedIn about taking off her “swanky new pair of Louboutins” to walk nearly a mile barefoot in the snow to a meeting at the World Economic Forum after her car got stuck. “People were shocked, but to me it seemed normal to stop at nothing,” she wrote. “And that’s exactly the mindset of an entrepreneur.”

LinkedIn was also, for a long time, virgin territory for posters. As the platform built out its sharing functionality, it had hundreds of millions of users but without the same culture of posting as Twitter or Instagram. “It was very untapped,” Rota says. Some users found that the same post would receive far more engagement on LinkedIn as compared with rival social platforms — making it an attractive place to concentrate their energies.

And now it’s becoming the only game in town. Facebook has been a wasteland for years. X, as Twitter is now known, is subject to Elon Musk’s mercurial whims. TikTok’s short-form video is a different form of content. Users have stopped posting on most other platforms. As Sarah Frier wrote in a Bloomberg column in August, “LinkedIn is becoming a site where regular people actually want to hang out and post their thoughts. It might even be cool.”