Everyone Hates LinkedIn: Reflections of a Former User
Contrarian Ideas are Smothered by Performative Generosity and Conventional Wisdom
For anyone new here, I’m the founder of Woo Punch, a brand design studio rooted in marketing science.
Note: I will likely rarely publish on Substack going forward. Every now and then I may stumble upon an idea for an article. When I do, it will be worth it. Subscribe to receive occasional emails.
If you are looking for worthwhile people to follow on Substack, check out Stef Hamerlinck (who writes about the power of mascots) and Nick Asbury (who writes about the dangers of social brand purpose). Both are on LinkedIn as well.
Honestly, I haven’t taken the time to look for great contributors in the brand design, marketing, and advertising industries on here—I’m sure there are plenty—but I read every article these two guys put out.
Every year during Lent, I give something up. Five years ago, I gave up LinkedIn—and I didn’t log back on for three years.
Right after that three-year hiatus ended, I wrote an article called LinkedIn is a Cesspool of Platitudes and Horseshit. I never forgot why I left in the first place, but after publishing that piece, I felt it was professionally necessary to ramp up my presence. So, for the next two years, I posted endlessly.
I didn’t play the standard personal branding game, though. Instead, I posted as a contrarian—pushing against conventional wisdom on the platform. I believed—because LinkedIn constantly tells us—that their algorithm rewards original thought. This couldn’t be further from the truth.
This past Lent (March 2026), I mostly stopped logging on again. I even stopped writing on Substack.
The reason I stopped was not because I was strong enough to fight against the pull to log on. I simply shifted my primary focus toward launching a new ministry inviting people to step into Catholic churches1—a space where the LinkedIn rat race is far less relevant.
Nothing about that platform has changed. The only reason I’m writing today is because I’ve had time to reflect on my experiences with both LinkedIn and Substack, and I have some free time this week to put it into words.
So, here is my reflection on five years on and off LinkedIn and Substack.
1. The Dialect of Performed Selflessness
Everyone on LinkedIn is there to make money. Most of us are trying to support our families—to land a client, find a job, stay visible enough that when the right opportunity appears, someone thinks of us. There’s nothing wrong with that. It’s honest. It’s human. It’s the entire reason a professional networking platform exists.
So why won’t anyone say it?
LinkedIn has developed its own dialect—a language of performed selflessness that everyone speaks and nobody believes. I’m just here to add value. I want to give back to this industry. My only goal is to help you grow. Say it enough and maybe you start to believe it yourself. The people who say it loudest are, almost without exception, selling something.
And the loudest branding altruists are almost never the best practitioners.
In the design world, the clearest example is Chris Do. He built an enormous audience—and a reported $64 million net worth—largely on the promise of teaching designers how to find the success he found. To be fair, the baseline in traditional branding can be shockingly low; here in Wisconsin, I’ve seen plenty of brick-and-mortar agencies occupying prime real estate who are somehow still designing like it’s 1999. Chris Do is certainly far better than that. But look closely at his output before he achieved internet fame and you won't find a portfolio of defining brand identities.
What you find instead is well-designed genericism—solid, competent work dressed up in contemporary trends. His studio was built primarily on motion design, not identity design. What he genuinely excels at—motion graphics, technical mastery, pitching, and public speaking—he underplayed, because positioning himself as a comprehensive brand identity authority who cracked the code was simply far more lucrative.
Do built an empire teaching identity design principles to an enormous audience of young designers without demonstrating real mastery of the craft. The result is a generation of designers who’ve learned to explain their work beautifully and execute it generically.
To his credit, Do has since repositioned himself as a personal branding expert—a lane where his skills are genuinely formidable and where the product is, essentially, himself. That’s a smarter and more honest fit. But it’s worth noting that the repositioning happened after years of trading on design authority he hadn’t fully earned. The audience came first, built on overstated credentials; the pivot followed. He’s still peddling the “add value” narrative, casting himself as a philanthropist rather than a profit-seeker.
Gary Vee is the same person wearing a different industry’s clothing. He grew his father’s wine business by taking it online early and being an aggressive early mover on YouTube—genuinely smart decisions. But he made those decisions with an existing customer base, an established business, and family capital behind him. Then he started an ad agency as a famous wine mogul with 1 million Twitter followers. The hustle gospel he built on top of that foundation quietly omits those structural head starts.
The formula is consistent enough that you can spot it almost anywhere once you’ve seen it: find an audience of people who desperately want to do a thing, position yourself as someone who did the thing better than you actually did, and monetize their aspiration. The altruism framing is the workhorse behind their business model. I’m here to help you is a much easier sell than I’m here to profit from your insecurity. Both statements are true. Only one goes in the LinkedIn bio.
2. The Myth of Algorithmic Originality
When I spent those two years posting endlessly as a contrarian, I genuinely believed LinkedIn wanted sharp, challenging ideas. I spent a lot of time thinking against the grain—poking at the assumptions identity designers treat as settled, trying to figure out where conventional wisdom fails.
I quickly learned that LinkedIn’s claims about rewarding original thought are marketing fiction. I just didn’t care. It was much more fun to poke at the industry, even if it wasn’t the smartest use of LinkedIn.
The algorithm is not built for contrarianism. It’s built for consensus—for posts that make people feel validated, inspired, and vaguely motivated to leave a supportive comment. The designers and consultants who build the largest LinkedIn audiences are almost never the ones with the sharpest ideas. They’re the ones who’ve figured out how to make conventional wisdom feel like revelation. They post the thing everyone already believes in the language of someone who just figured it out.
Substack was the complete opposite for me. My subscribers there came without any algorithmic strategy, without gaming comment sections, and without performing enthusiasm for other writers’ work. They came because of ideas. Substack, at least in its early structure, rewarded original thought because the writing wasn’t a sales funnel—it was the thing itself.
I don’t have any illusions that Substack will stay immune forever, though. It’s the nature of tech platforms to eventually reverse course on whatever made them genuinely useful—to discover that the thing their users loved is less profitable than the thing that keeps them scrolling. Every other platform follows the same arc: useful, then popular, then monetized in ways that hollow out the original value. LinkedIn is just further along that curve, but Substack will get there.
On LinkedIn, however, that decay is already complete. The platform turns everyone into a brand-builder whether they want to be one or not, punishing pushback and rewarding the performance of agreement and generosity.
3. When Fame Became a Prerequisite for Craft
What made those two years of endless posting so exhausting was the realization that identity design—a field whose entire purpose is to make other people’s organizations recognizable—had quietly made practitioner fame a prerequisite for work.
You couldn’t just do good work anymore. You had to be known for the work. And the primary venue for being known was a platform built on performative cheerleading.
I recently came close to landing an executive leadership role I hadn’t gone looking for. It fell through, but the experience clarified something for me: I felt almost no attachment to the visibility my work had generated. What I felt was immense relief at the prospect of just doing the work, reliably, without the machinery of self-promotion running in the background. The exhaustion I didn’t realize I was carrying lifted briefly, only to return when the opportunity passed and I had to start the engine back up.
4. The Necessary Evil and the Charade We Accept
The tragedy of LinkedIn isn’t that people are using it to find business. The tragedy is that the system forces everyone to hide that reality behind a mask of performative generosity.
Let’s be honest about what LinkedIn actually is: a necessary evil.
For millions of freelancers, agency owners, and corporate workers, being on LinkedIn isn’t a passion project or a hobby—it’s an economic requirement. Everyone hates LinkedIn. We log on because we have mortgages to pay, families to feed, and businesses to keep alive. The primary, underlying reason almost anyone posts on that platform is to land clients, secure jobs, or build enough professional capital to survive.
Yet, virtually no one feels permitted to say that out loud.
Instead, the platform demands that everyone participate in a collective charade. To land a client, you aren’t allowed to simply say, “I do great work, here are my rates, hire me.” You have to package your sales pitch as “thought leadership.” You have to reframe your business development as a selfless gift to the community.
This expectation has gotten so out of hand that even executive leadership positions now carry a social media tax. Companies are increasingly screening executives based on the size of their digital footprint and personal following—treating personal reach as a default metric for leadership competence. Personal branding is no longer optional for entrepreneurs; it has become a mandatory prerequisite for corporate survival.
I don’t judge the people still on LinkedIn who play the game. Most of them aren’t grifters; they’re just professionals trying to survive in an industry that demands visibility. They wrap their posts in platitudes because that’s what the algorithm rewards and what corporate culture expects.
The only reason I was able to step off the treadmill this past Lent wasn’t because I cracked the code or defeated the algorithm. It was simply because I shifted my center of gravity. By stepping back from the full-time design grind to launch a ministry, I entered a space where daily content creation and algorithmic consensus no longer dictate my survival.
I am still a designer at heart. When the right client and project align, I still take on identity and branding work. But my livelihood no longer relies on feeding an engine of endless personal branding.
I step back from the platform not with contempt for those trapped on it, but with deep relief that I no longer have to participate in the performance just to justify my craft. LinkedIn will continue to run on its dialect of disguised ambition and manufactured altruism. At least now, I can call it what it is from the outside—and do the work on my own terms.
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