R. Paulo Delgado

I deleted all social media apps from my phone this month, and I’m a much happier person. I get more done, read more, don’t feel the FOMO I felt before, and feel zero pressure about impressing anybody about anything.

I’m happier with myself as I am.

It’s the kind of result you’d expect from people who write about meditation. Well, whether you meditate or not, add this to your self-healing routine: Get rid of social media.

Whereas the topic of dumping social media merits its own article (which I hope to write soon), the impetus for what drove me to do it started on LinkedIn — or, rather, what LinkedIn has become: A room full of robots where nary a human can be found.

LinkedIn was the first app I deleted, and here’s why.

I love(d) LinkedIn

Let me be clear: I love LinkedIn. I always have. And I hope they get their shit together because I’ve gotten plenty of business from it in the past.

I stopped getting so much business from it about two years ago, and I suspect it’s largely because the humans have all left the room.

Yes, yes, yes, AI has made it tougher for writers to get work, but the writing work I do get now pays more and is more rewarding. I recently made a big splash about how I was “finished with my writing career,” only to have my writing career suddenly pick up. Old clients (who I strongly suspect burned their fingers with AI) have returned, and new, high-end clients continue to find me.

Thank goodness I no longer have to write the keyword-stuffing crap that some of the lower-paying clients used to demand. AI can take that work with pleasure.

So, while AI has indeed changed the landscape for writers and creators, and pushed a lot of the low-hanging fruit off the market, I suspect that LinkedIn isn’t sending me as much work as before because no one is there.

It feels like it’s mostly AI agents on there now.

LinkedIn has so much potential, but it’s destroying itself by trying to be like other platforms LinkedIn isn’t Facebook, but it’s trying to be, and that’s partly where the platform is going wrong. This isn’t necessarily LinkedIn’s fault. “Gurus” constantly suggest that the best way to get business is to “create great content.”

I’ve gotten exactly one deal that way on LinkedIn, and that was from an existing connection. Only one. I got plenty of others by simply having a profile.

No, “creating content” is overrated on LinkedIn, but that’s not what people believe.

I opened my LinkedIn account when a client asked me to ghostwrite posts for him, and I instantly fell in love with the platform. I appreciated that it enforced professionalism, and that it focused on getting business.

Hell, as someone approaching 40, I was all in for getting business. And I got plenty of it on LinkedIn.

I didn’t get that business through engagement or views or likes or all of the “look at me, look at, look at me” cringefests you find on Facebook and Instagram.

Somehow, people found me on the platform through search. This is still the way they find me, but the influx is less.

What made LinkedIn great wasn’t the engagement and the likes. It was the business deals. No one I know opened their LinkedIn account to create content and become an influencer. They opened it to get business.

However, the constant emphasis on engagement, likes, and viral posts has given users FOMO. “Oh, I have no clue how to write, but I must write something otherwise I’ll get no engagement and then I’ll get no business…”

People get fed this malarkey by gurus, start feeling the “pressure to perform,” and then turn to AI as a misguided solution to creating content.

The only problem is that the AI content is awful.

Scrolling through the LinkedIn feed in the last year has left me with the impression that LinkedIn has become a ghost town manned by robots on automation.

I recently deleted more than half of my LinkedIn connections. One interesting thing about the exercise was that a small portion of those connections immediately sent me a new connection request. This is automation at work. They have some or other tool running in the background that detects who visited their profile, then blindly send a connection request.

How is that helping me “build a business network”?

It isn’t.

The AI-slop has turned LinkedIn into a bunch of robot-powered peacocks

I’ve got no problem with people tooting their own horn or promoting their achievements, especially on LinkedIn.

One of the most common “complaints” I see from LinkedIn haters is that they dislike it when people say they’re “humbled” to win an award.

Look, it’s a turn of phrase. Get over it.

I’m on LinkedIn to get business, and others are on LinkedIn to get business. I’d like to do business with successful people. When those people post awards they’ve received, I pay attention.

So, I’m not one of those who laments every self-aggrandizing post on LinkedIn. It’s a part of the trade.

The problem is when the person doing the self-aggrandizing isn’t even present.

LinkedIn has always been a peacock show, and that’s fine. But the peacocks have been replaced with clanking, metallic AI peacocks who are all talking to each other.

No humans is in the room.

As someone who previously spent a good two hours a day on LinkedIn, consuming content and learning about my industry, I now spend less than three minutes a day on it. It’s AI-post after AI-post after AI-post.

As for the occasional few who post great human content (some notable examples are David Heinemeier Hansson and Isaiah N. Granet), I can catch up on all their posts in a few minutes.

Or maybe I’ll catch them somewhere else.

The comments are the worst

And then there’s the matter of automated, ChatGPT-generated comments.

God help us.

Here’s an anecdote that captures the nuances of this existential crisis perfectly: I once interviewed the founder of a large startup in the fintech sector. They did incredible work. I really liked him as a human. He had a laudatory background. He was someone I wanted to follow and know about.

We connected on LinkedIn, and I enjoyed seeing his posts.

This was all pre-AI era.

Post-AI, I commented on one of his posts.

His reply to my comment was so clearly AI-generated that I did a double-take. My first thought was wondering whether he’d even read the comment. (I don’t believe he did.)

My second thought was, “Are these guys broke?”

I mean, if a CEO has no time to write LinkedIn posts, hire a ghostwriter. At least the responses would be human.

But if they can’t even afford to do that…

The thought that companies using AI are so broke that they can’t afford professional content creators has emerged repeatedly for me. I’m not being facetious. I genuinely wonder about their budgets when they post the awful crap they’re posting on their blogs and social media feeds.

I mean, no one in their right mind would approve that shit — unless they were so broke that they had no choice.

I unfollowed him, but decided to follow him again a few months later. Shame on me. I commented again on a post. Same result.

This time, I didn’t think, “Are they broke?” I thought: “Elvis has left the building.”

The dude just isn’t there, and he and his marketing team have likely convinced themselves that they are “improving margins” by failing to hire a ghostwriter and instead automating LinkedIn commenting through an AI agent — such clever, clever people, no?

This time, I didn’t unfollow him. I removed the connection. Eventually, I removed more than a thousand connections on LinkedIn because 90% of the posts I was seeing were all clearly AI-generated.

Apparently, I’m not the only one disappointed with the platform.

I doubt LinkedIn is going to get rid of its AI problem

LinkedIn is owned by Microsoft, which owns 27% of OpenAI. Microsoft has been trying to shove generative AI down our throats ever since ChatGPT’s release at the end of 2022.

One Classic example is the company’s botched-up effort to destroy Google by implementing a not-ready-for-prime-time AI chatbot in Bing search that ended up being nothing short of a disaster.

Much of Microsoft’s bet on OpenAI is contingent on the company achieving AGI, which experts agree is never going to happen if we follow the current generative AI paradigms. LLMs just aren’t built for human-level intelligence. They’re built for sophisticated text parsing and generation.

Still, the hype machine pumps desperately away at consumers, trying to convince us that AGI is just around the corner, while evidence mounts that generative AI simply isn’t profitable.

If you had put all your eggs in the AI basket, and that basket was full of holes, would you just let them fall? No, you’d keep the hype machine producing at a mad rate in the hopes that someone eventually bought you a new basket.

I suspect that the Microsoft conflict of interest is partly why LinkedIn now integrates “Rewrite with AI” and “Write with AI” buttons into its post-creation and connection-request dialog boxes. Instead of giving users what they want, LinkedIn is doing what Microsoft has been doing for three years: Shoving AI down our throats hard enough in the hopes that we’ll eventually stop gagging and accept it.

It’s been three years, and I’m still gagging.