my hypothesis is the reason most LinkedIn content is unbearable isn’t because people are stupid . it’s because they’re playing a game, correctly, and the game rewards being boring.

i wrote this about information cascades and corporate performance theatre and the idea that nothing is working, the appearance of working is working.

this is the follow-up where i try to figure out WHY the game works this way.

the midwit problem

there’s this meme called the Midwit. you’ve probably seen it (look up its right there).

on the left is the low IQ guy (the brainlet). on the right is the high IQ guy (the monk). in the middle is the midwit, a crying Wojak, representing the average-intelligence person who overthinks everything.

the joke is that the brainlet and the monk always agree with each other.

the brainlet says something simple because he doesn’t know any better.

the monk says the same simple thing because he’s transcended the complexity.

the midwit in the middle is furious because he’s done all this analysis and arrived at a completely different, much more complicated answer that nobody cares about.

and i think this is LinkedIn.

the best content on LinkedIn comes from two types of people. the person who just says something honest and unfiltered because they don’t know or care about the rules. and the person who’s so established they can say whatever they want because the rules don’t apply to them anymore.

the midwit zone on LinkedIn isn’t about intelligence. it’s about social risk.

the people in the middle have enough to lose that they can’t afford to be interesting, but not enough status to be protected if they are. so they optimise for safety. they write posts about “learnings” and “the power of vulnerability” and “here’s what i told my team on Monday morning” and it’s all the same shit.

the brainlet equivalent is the person who posts a meme because they don’t know that’s supposed to be a risky take.

the monk equivalent is harder to name because the whole point is they're not performing, which means you might not have noticed them. if pressed, i’d go with CEO of Buffer or the Ghost CEO

the resume shield

my boss and i had this conversation recently.

their resume is a shield and you’re not endorsing the idea, you’re endorsing the career.

which means the actual quality of the content becomes almost irrelevant past a certain point. someone with a strong enough title can post “don’t fire ur employees on christmas” and get 2,000 likes. someone with no title can post something genuinely sharp and insightful and get 40 likes because engaging with it is a gamble.

you don’t know this person. what if they’re weird. what if your boss sees you liked something from someone with no checkmark on their profile.

i keep thinking about this with people like Greg Isenberg. like, he’ll post stuff like “there will be 10,000 AI millionaires printed by building agencies for clawdbot bugs” or whatever and you’re like... mate. but it performs because the resume validates the take.

the take doesn’t have to survive on its own merits.

game theory, but make it LinkedIn

there are a few frameworks that explain why bullshit thrives on LinkedIn, and they all reinforce each other in a way that’s actually pretty elegant

start with the basic problem. posting honestly is risky. if you post something real and nobody engages, or worse, your boss sees it and it’s awkward, you’ve defected against yourself.

so you don’t. and neither does anyone else. and the feed becomes a wasteland of “love this take” and “needed to hear this today.” this is the prisoner’s dilemma but for attention. the shared resource is the quality of the feed. everyone benefits from it being good. nobody wants to be the one who takes the risk to make it good.

so what do people default to instead? Thomas Schelling had this idea that when people need to coordinate without communicating, they gravitate towards whatever feels most obvious.

his example was “if you had to meet a stranger in New York City with no way to contact them, where would you go?”

most people said Grand Central Station at noon. not because it’s the best spot. because it’s the most default.

on LinkedIn, the default is corporate optimism.

if you don’t know what to post, you post something positive, professional, and vaguely inspirational because that’s what you assume everyone else is doing. and because everyone assumes everyone else is doing it, everyone does it. the thing about Schelling focal points is they work even when nobody actually prefers the outcome. you don’t have to like Grand Central Station. you just have to assume everyone else will go there.

and then the spiral kicks in.

Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann described this in 1974. people constantly scan their environment to figure out what the majority opinion is. if they think they’re in the minority, they stay quiet. which makes the perceived majority seem even bigger. which makes even more people stay quiet.

on LinkedIn this is devastating. the vocal minority is the thought leadership crowd posting safe, corporate-approved takes. the silent majority is everyone who thinks this is all a bit ridiculous but won’t say so because they assume they’re the only one who thinks that.

they’re not. almost nobody thinks the content is good. but almost nobody says so because almost nobody else is saying so. everyone privately disagrees (enter r/linkedinlunatics) with the norm but publicly conforms to it because they think everyone else genuinely believes it.

i lied when i said 5 frameworks. i was going to add the “mere exposure affect” and “social currency” but you’re smart, you can imagine i wrote about that.
let’s MOVE ON.

engagement pods

okay so i have to talk about engagement pods because they’re the most honest version of everything i’ve been describing. like, corporate performance theatre pretends it isn’t a game. engagement pods just admit it.

(quick history for anyone who doesn’t know but probably know)

skip this if you know what a pod is

engagement pods are private groups where members agree to like and comment on each other’s posts to game the algorithm. you post, you share the link in the pod, 10-20 people immediately engage, and the algorithm goes “oh this is popular” and shows it to more people.

okay, resume reading here please

by 2023 LinkedIn started catching on. Linkedin shifted the algorithm to prioritise “knowledge sharing” and closer connections. reach and engagement dropped. research by someone i think is a total grifter found views and engagement down roughly 50% across the board.

then in 2024 they went further and basically replaced their entire ranking system with a foundation model called 360Brew.

look, here’s an infograph i made!

late last year, LinkedIn’s VP of Product Gyanda Sachdeva publicly said their goal was to “make engagement pods entirely ineffective.” they started rate-limiting comments, flagging automated activity, and reducing the reach of anything that looked coordinated.

i don’t think they ever actually worked. not in the way people thought they did.

the whole premise of a pod is that early engagement triggers the algorithm to show your post to more people. and that’s true, technically.

but what the pod people never accounted for is WHO those early engagers are and what their networks look like.

my coworker Ian said something about this that i think is the cleanest take anyone’s had

and he’s right. if the only way your post gets traction is by having your team like it, the content isn’t doing the work. you’re just using social obligation as a distribution hack (and don’t i know it, i do it often).

back to funding announcements (i have a chip on my shoulder idgaf) a funding announcement is the same thing but nobody calls it a pod.

anyway.. like my shit on Linkedin

let’s wrap it up i have some soup to eat

i still haven’t done the “nothing” post. the one i said i’d do. the “this gets deleted at 5,000 likes”.

i think the reason i haven’t done it is because i keep trying to figure out the game theory of why it would work and that’s exactly the midwit trap.

the brainlet would just do it. the monk would just do it.

i’m sitting here writing essays about it.

this is a follow-up to nothing is working if you liked that one you’ll probably like this one.

Love you,

hope you win.

Renée xx