Is it just me or has LinkedIn become a slightly awkward space

Spend any time on LinkedIn and a pattern quickly emerges. The platform’s algorithm seems to reward a very specific kind of confidence; the self-congratulatory, the relentlessly upbeat, the people for whom success seems to have arrived early, easily and with excellent lighting and filters.

Scroll for long enough and the cast of characters becomes familiar. The entrepreneurial survivalist who ‘started with nothing but a broken laptop, a Calibri lighter and 50p in loose change’. The sales prophet with the one winning formula. Yours, naturally, for the suspiciously precise sum of £5,559.79.

Everyone is smashing it on LinkedIn. Everyone’s scaling.

Everyone is mere seconds away from passive income and a sunrise swim somewhere tax efficient (you know where I’m talking about).

So, how does one squeeze oneself into a relentlessly upbeat feed for something that will genuinely interest a small audience- let's say, senior leaders- when the algorithm reads it as terminally unexciting?

Most senior leaders I’ve worked with have been shaped not by winning formulas or personal brands, but by long exposure to complexity, responsibility, scrutiny, to the weight of difficult decisions that don’t come with applause or ‘likes’. None of them are scrolling LinkedIn while sipping a Bin Juice Gimlet, nibbling out of date Dubai chocolate and reclining photogenically on a sun lounger.

Their work looks and feels very different. They’re busy making decisions with incomplete information, balancing competing pressures and living with consequences that don’t resolve neatly or quickly. Much of it is painfully slow and ambiguous, and decisions only reveal their wisdom (or otherwise) much later. They're not the sort of crew gorging themselves on the ‘HoW aMaZiNg Am I?’ content.

Which is why the less performative corners of LinkedIn still matter. For all the collective eye-rolling the platform inspires (guilty), it does contain more than one mode of communication. Short, polished, self-congratulatory posts may dominate the feed, but they’re not the only option.

Longer, non hustle-core pieces tend to be passed over on LinkedIn for the simple reason that they don’t shout very loudly, and don’t compete well in a feed that rewards immediacy, confidence and a partially clothed selfie. Take Dan Cable, Professor of Organisational Behaviour at London School of Business. His writing is thoughtful and insightful. Wading through the algorithmic swamp of LinkedIn and stumbling upon one of his articles (like ‘How Humble Leadership Really Works’) is a bit like finding your way to the kitchen at a party, away from the noise, into a space where the conversation is calmer and more substantial. It’s not heart stoppingly thrilling. No one’s filming it. But it’s calm, grounded and far more nourishing than whatever’s happening in the other room.

If you’ve grown weary of the relentless success stories, you’re probably using LinkedIn in much the same way as everyone else who has grown weary of them. You dip in sporadically, usually between meetings or late in the day, when the toxic positivity feels easier to tolerate. You save the occasional piece that seems to be saying something real. You forward it to a colleague with a brief “this might be worth a look”. And then, weeks later, you find yourself returning to it, long after the moment of publication has passed. Most of this happens without ceremony. No likes. No comments. Just a small, invisible trail of people trying to extract something useful from all the noise.

LinkedIn articles allow for a different register. They’re more explanation than declaration. They allow detailed thinking and context, rather than compressing everything into emoji-soup triumph. They feel less like social media and more like a considered thought process, the sort you’d happily read in an industry magazine. It gives people room to explain how they work, why they do things a certain way, or how they would approach a particular challenge. It becomes an example that can be pointed to and it helps give the reader a sense of the person behind the thinking. Importantly, they resist the pressure to flatten everything into a single, confident takeaway.

The real audience for these pieces is not the loud, visible one. Articles are read by peers, regulators, journalists, stakeholders and future hires who probably don’t like or comment publicly. They’re shared internally, referenced in emails, bookmarked and revisited months, sometimes years later.

Articles may look underwhelming if you judge them by views or likes alone. But they can be doing far more work than the metrics suggest. A well written piece that attracts modest attention publicly can still be doing significant work behind the scenes, finding exactly the right readers, and circulating where it matters.

Frequency is rarely the point. One or two articles a quarter is often enough. These pieces act like anchors rather than updates, still holding meaning long after the internet has finished discussing how Victoria Beckham danced at her son’s wedding.

In a professional social media culture that now seems to be dominated by speed and spectacle, LinkedIn articles offer a way to speak without either. And for people who want to be understood rather than applauded, that is precisely why they still matter.

Wondering why Stakeholders nod, then do the opposite? Find out why, here.

Photo by Souvik Banerjee on Unsplash