Blame the pandemic’s deprivations and our collective need for personal connection. Or maybe blame Gen Z as generational oversharers, but LinkedIn has evolved from a place where people not only post promotions and business and industry-focused content to a platform for revealing the overly personal, leading to—of course—public mockery, because some cannot resist the chance to be funny on the internet.
In 2018, John Hickey was working in tech sales and sick of the culture of endless self-promotion. He wanted to be a writer, but his days were filled with self-aggrandizing emails. So he decided to have some fun.
The millennial in San Francisco started posting the worst-offending “LinkedInfluencers” he found to his personal Twitter page — the shameless humblebrags, the personal anecdotes of dubious veracity, the #HustleCulture koans promoting a questionable approach to work-life balance. They were an instant hit, and the retweets rolled in. So he decided to spin up a dedicated meme page poking fun at the excesses of online professional culture and the Ted Talkification of LinkedIn. He called it @BestOfLinkedIn.
In one post, he skewered a CEO who talked about being “vulnerable” and shared a crying selfie after laying off employees. In another, he criticized a user who wrote about taking time off after her father died but made sure to keep checking LinkedIn. (He also leaked Peter Rota’s bashful urinary tract.) A larger rival account emerged, State Of LinkedIn, and a Reddit community thrived — “LinkedIn Lunatics.”
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