LinkedIn Is Ghosting My Friends

New behaviour of the platform leads to an ever-shrinking bubble

Nov 10, 2024

Happy posts, advertising, and posts that tell how all the other such posts and senders are wrong, instead I should listen only to this one.

That’s all I see. I try to take part in the discussions in the comments, but it is difficult when all people comment is “That is so right!”, or “Haha, I will share that!”

And I am thinking back, just a few months…

An ever-growing universe of heavy influencers dominated the picture on LinkedIn, and they were really everywhere, all the time. Having scheduled an abundance of posts about everything and nothing, they didn’t leave much room in the feeds of ordinary people for seeing posts from their real contacts, those people they would most of all want to see posts from.

It had become a spammers’ paradise.

During a few months, more and more of these spammers began discussing — openly on the platform — how they had seen their views reduced by large factors overnight. New algo, for sure, but what happened more precisely? They discussed — or, rather, as they were all claiming to be LinkedIn experts, they told each other non-stop what was going on and developed more and more ways of tricking the algo to again letting them get those beloved high numbers of views.

Only, those tricks didn’t work, and most of these influencers have now died out in my stream.

I recently wrote in another article, Double Bubble Trouble, how my old bubble on LinkedIn had been swapped with a new and thinner one over night — full of new people, none of the old ones.

Now, finally, after monitoring the system and thinking about the behavior, I know what is going on.

The main element in the new situation is that people seem to disappear from the stream. People you have been connected to for years and who you know publish a lot, are not to be seen at all.

Another element is that new people you only recently got connected with — and people you are not connected with and not even following, are showing up all the time in the stream.

Apparently, the connection status isn’t what feeds your stream, as it used to be.

Now, instead, it is your activity pattern: those people you have interacted with recently, will have their posts shown in your stream. And in two levels, so to speak, as you will also see some of those posts they have interacted with.

Your connections are forgotten in the stream — unless… LinkedIn has added some bells and whistles, or at least a bell, which is to be found on each user’s profile, and similarly on each company profile — clicking on that bell will bring in posts from these parties into your stream.

What this means

LinkedIn has effectively changed the platform from benefitting many followers into benefitting interactivity. It is also now downplaying the very detail that made it popular in the first place: the connections.

As there is no way to send a message to all your connections, you cannot tell them to click on your bell, so you cannot expect that they see anything of what you write — unless you go to each of them, individually, and interact with their posts or send them a message.

In other words, you are no longer connected to your so-called connections, unless you take steps to reconnect. Sure, they are listed as connections, but you are not hearing from them, they not from you, so what kind of connection is that? Actually, the connections list is now just the equivalent of a phonebook.

The old bubble you had created by following and connecting has shrunk to a minimum size, just big enough to hold you and control you, and as your connections no longer define what you see — the social media part is made up of your daily interactions.

It looks to me like you need to maintain the interaction with people on a quite frequent basis — a couple of weeks without clicking on a person’s posts will make the one vanish from your stream until something new happens that could bring them in again.

So, going on a few weeks’ vacation without logging in should ensure that you return to a pretty empty stream? Well, I doubt. First, there are the ads. More and more of them, as I see it. Second, there must be a kind of minimum-fill mechanism in play to prevent the system from dying out — as it would, if the users started believing that nobody published anything anymore.

I have, indeed, observed how an occasional post from an old connection does show up — ready with 500 likes and many comments, meaning that I am not seeing it as one of the first.

Also, there are periods where the stream is full of posts from the last week. Posts that I have seen already or perhaps missed when they were new.

At least these two types of minimum-fills seem to exist.

In any case, LinkedIn is no longer promoting long-term engagement with other people, it keeps you in an ever-changing, tiny bubble that doesn’t honour who you know or feel connected to. LinkedIn keeps you strictly in that narrow slice of time that is “now”.

Why did they do this?

I believe that LinkedIn is doing all this to get better control of your stream. They reduce the number of posts drastically, ensuring that only contents that are calling for immediate interaction is spread on the platform, which in the mind of a social media company probably sounds the same as “high quality contents”, and they can better squeeze in ads on strategic places.

Ads are worth more if placed with relevant quality contents, so the whole thing is an attempt by LinkedIn to get more milk out of their cow.

What they didn’t understand (and never will)

When most of the users on social media see that their friends and connections have stopped being active, they do not automatically believe that it must be a new algorithmic feature meant for someone to earn more money. No, they believe that their friends and connections have stopped being active. People do not in general reach out for heavy analytical tools when observing something that looks normal — and it would be normal for a friend to stop posting. The friend could be busy, focusing on a different platform, having a social media break, or whatever.

And when all their friends leave, they will also themselves leave. What fun is there in being alone on a social platform?

By far most of the users of such a platform are not active — they log in, watch what their contacts have written, and log out again. Most people never even touch a “like”-button or write a comment. They just watch.

But watching is not interaction, so they will see a still thinner stream with the few posts still there being of a generic nature, as per the minimum-fill mechanism, and eventually concluding, what I wrote above — that they lost all their reasons for being on the platform: the posts written by their contacts.

At LinkedIn, some commercial managers probably never noticed that people by large do not interact. So there was never a hint in the process of developing this new concept, that they would lose their users this way.

No hint either, that I, as an active user, can see LinkedIn ghosting my friends on the platform om my behalf by not sending them my posts. So, whoever I am connected to and for whatever reason, will start believing that I am not active at all; may even think that I left the platform. I, for sure, have thought something like that about many of my long-term connections there.

What comes next?

I wanted to do some kind of test or experiment where I would try to find out what is really happening, but there are some built-in obstacles in this that I cannot overcome:

The algorithm is being changed all the time without my knowledge, so I wouldn’t know what my test results mean — they could tell something about how it was until now, or how it is from now on, or even how it was for just a short moment.
There is no transparency with such algorithms. For some reason, the social media consider it most important to not let their users know what is going on with their posts, and with very many potential parameters it would be difficult to design a test — what should I focus on?
A test should probably include making some old connections writing a post, so that I could check if it would appear to me. But I would have no idea of why a post would not show up — maybe it would just be shown at a time where I incidentally didn’t look at the screen, or maybe it simply had to compete with thousands of other posts about the space. So, a no-show wouldn’t prove much.

Ideas on how to determine what the algorithm is really doing are welcome! It could be fun to uncover bits of the nature of this virtual bit of the universe.

But, it isn’t my role in life to keep hunting for an understanding of the rules of the games other people are playing with me. I guess that both I and others will eventually just get tired of this game and leave it — letting the fans run around in the social media maze while I instead will go for a walk in the real nature, maybe bringing a fishing rod, a camera, a sketchbook, or just pen and paper for writing about the real world while observing it.

Walking, fishing, photographing, drawing, writing — isn’t all this of a much deeper, much stronger emotional nature than the pseudo-tasks of trying to understand an invented, commercial world that changes indefinitely?

Updates and additions:

After publishing the article, I was told by a reader how there are reports and tools that tell about the use of social media — and where the influencers are. So if you cannot find the influencers, try searching for media monitoring and influencer identification tools like Favikon or Digimind.

I should also mention that a LinkedIn guru is publishing a yearly report with insights in how the algorithm currently works — he is called Richard van der Bloom and the report can be found in his resources list on his LinkedIn page (requires login with a LinkedIn account).

In his latest report at the time of writing this, called “The Algorithm Insights 2024 Report” there are some details (on page 46) that can explain some of the behavior that I mentioned, but not all. Reading a report like this btw. confirms my feeling that LinkedIn is now all about marketing — which means that it is not about social or keeping in touch, and, hence, not about being interesting for the ordinary users.