I am not on LinkedIn

I’m writing this a bit in advance of my exodus from LinkedIn, mainly so indexing can pick this up before someone googles “abe flansburg linkedin”.

A nice little robot standing on a pile of metallic debris, using a flamethrower on the LinkedIn logo while stick business people cry in the background ....see more garbage like this on this crappy app I built called gifslop

I used to be a daily reader and found many of the posts I encountered over the years to be thought provoking and intriguing. There are still a few… but very few.

I spent quite a bit of time trying to better curate content for my feed by following different people. Experimented with hibernating my account, then re-hibernating it to see if suggested content changed (it got worse somehow).

Then I let the truth sink in. Influencer culture and the general enshittification of things had ruined intelligent content and conversation on many forums like LinkedIn. That and the enormous amount of low-effort AI-generated posts and regurgitative hype around ‘AI’ (most people actually mean Large Language Models).

CritPost

That’s one reason I built CritPost, which was an interesting way to weaponize ‘AI’ against ‘AI’.

The idea was to get people to shame either themselves, or others, into posting more interesting, original, and well-written content.

I even built a Chrome Extension

I got a bit too busy at Altitude, and I was discouraged by a lot of things I was seeing on LinkedIn and I just kind of let it sit there. It’s still there if you want to check it out. There is a ‘Join waitlist’ button on the site.

After CritPost

As I mentioned, work was picking up and a lot of interesting things were going on:

• productionizing interesting vibe-coded prototypes from non-engineering folks
• research papers being written
• iterating on our robust clinical extraction pipelines that many downstream services depend on

I uninstalled LinkedIn from my phone and stopped checking it.

I realized after a month that I did not miss it at all.

Lunatics

One thing I didn’t stop doing was reading the LinkedIn Lunatics sub on Reddit. Some people may find ridiculing really bizarre or out-of-touch posts on LinkedIn as a bit gauche. However, I’d argue that, with the advent of the Internet and open forums where anyone can literally say anything, ridicule is sometimes a useful mechanism for change.

You tell me if I’m wrong.

Here are some actual posts that have appeared on the sub.

Completely out of touch headhunter ^

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Hypocritical CEO pwned by customer ^

But there’s satire too

This is actually satire ^

but anyways

Don’t get me wrong, LinkedIn remains a great way to:

• get a job
• network with people in similar roles, industries, or at your company
• try to market your vibe-coded platform via unsolicited DMs (thanks to LI’s monetization strategy)
• join an online echo chamber
• engage in groupthink

Yeah, the last 3 were cheap shots, but real things that bugged me on the platform.

I’ve started following some folks on substack, which I actually prefer.

I’ve also joined some special-interest Discord servers, both for professional related content and non. Some of them suffer from similar issues that LinkedIn and other forums have, but you can just leave and find another one (or start another one).