Lunchtime blog post!

I noticed something weird about my blogs recently. Most of them (but not all) get crossposted to LinkedIn. Previously I would get a decent amount of “impressions.” Oh wait, let’s talk about what impressions are.

LinkedIn tracks a few different types of ‘enagement’ on your posts. You can find them pretty easily and the analytics screen looks like this:

You’ve got:

• Impressions — how many times your post is shown in a feed
• “Members Reached” which is the same as impressions, but with duplicates shown to the same person removed (as far as I can tell)
• Reactions — thumbs up, laughing emoji, etc.
• Comments — You know what this is
• Reposts — when someone adds a little context to your post and reposts it.

Above are the results for a recent post, which shows uh … not a ton of engagement. I’m not too concerned about it (I mean, there’s a reason I post on my blog instead of straight to LinkedIn), but it did seem weird to me, so I looked back a couple month. Here’s how my impressions looked going back to April:

You can see a couple spikes for popular posts, and then a flat line where I took a break from LinkedIn. I came back and posted a couple of times and got similar engagement to before and then … it just fell off a cliff.

Now, performance isn’t based on the quality of my content (which I will argue is relatively consistent), but is based on what the LinkedIn algorithm chooses to show. My views fell off a cliff not because I pivoted to being a Taylor Swig fan blog (although I did have that one music review recently), but because LinkedIn decided not to display my content.

Now why is that?

Today I got the answer. A notification popped up.

And what does it say?

That’s so weird! I HAVE noticed that nobody is noticing. And what’s the fix? It’s right there in the second to last paragraph.

“Premium subscribers can join …”

LinkedIn has been pushing premium subscribtions for a long time, but it seems they’ve finally taken a page from Elon Musk’s book, and are no longer content to hope people pay for addons. Instead, they are demoting the posts of people who don’t pay (or, more accurately, promoting the posts of people who DO pay over the posts of people who don’t).

And I have noticed that LinkedIn is now frequently feeding me posts of people I don’t even follow that have been promoted:

To be clear, they showed promoted posts before, but it wasn’t individuals, it was always companies obviously paying for ads. Now I get this random … hold on …. ENHANCE

Ah. A LinkedIn Premium (or whatever) subscriber.

(Also, what is a “Christian Orthopedic Surgeon”?)

I guess enshittification comes for us all. But I have to be honest. I always thought LinkedIn was basically too boring to succumb.

But I was wrong.