There was a time when connection requests came from people you actually knew, colleagues you had met, or those with a genuine reason to reach out. Now many of us, myself included, have switched off open invites. Ironically, when you do find someone you would genuinely value connecting with, it can be almost impossible.
The number of courses and pitches promising to help you “win on LinkedIn” has exploded, teaching people how to optimise posts for engagement, likes and comments, all the things we once kept separate from the business world.
In the LinkedIn world, it is not doom scrolling, it is boom scrolling. The feed is filled with self-promotion, new job announcements and deeply personal stories. None of these are wrong, but they leave me wondering whether LinkedIn is now a better tool for building business connection, or whether it has simply fallen into the same patterns that turned other social networks into endless loops of performance and noise.
The truth is that every partnership and project I am part of today has come through real-world relationships. As impressive as the likes, follows and connections might seem, it is those genuine connections that have proved most valuable and most appreciated.
For me, LinkedIn is simply one place where past and future connections meet, a digital trace of real-world relationships. It now feels more like a noisy conference, a room full of people talking over one another. Yet among the crowd there are still familiar faces I am glad to see, and every so often the LinkedIn machine sparks out a business, idea or person worth connecting with in the real world.
But like those conferences, it feels all the more important to choose when to attend, to know when to step away, and maybe this short pondering will spark a future real-world connection, one that moves beyond the feed and back into conversation.
Maybe that is what it is for now.