LinkedIN changed me and I started to hate who I became. I reluctantly joined LinkedIN in 2007, about four years after it was first launched. At first it was more of a digital rolodex; a way to keep track of people I've worked with and might want to contact at some point in the future. I didn't really use it as a social networking site yet. In many ways I felt accomplished in 2007; I had an established career and was on a path to meaningful, rewarding work. Then something changed, I experienced extreme burn out for the first time and had a bit of an existential crisis. I gave up the career I was building in New York and decided that I wasn't really cut out for the cut-throat nature of the marketing industry in the United States. I wasn't willing to do what was required to advance my career and considered walking away from the whole kit and caboodle.
After a lot of self-reflection, I decided it was time to come back to my home in Canada. I quickly found a shop in Toronto and accepted a significant pay cut to join a group of people I absolutely fell in love with. After a couple years of consistent delivery the shop laid me off in a way that broke my heart. The family I felt accepted by was ripped away and all of a sudden LinkedIN became more important.
It was around 2008/2009 that I reexamined my career and asked myself what I really enjoyed doing. The answer was experience design; which was always a part of what I did in a way. I completely devoted myself to the practice and became the most passionate student of experience design I could. I spent every second learning, I spent every dollar on experience design books, classes, and conferences, I surrounded myself with everyone and anyone that was succeeding in the industry; and I applied what I learnt on real projects at a handful of different shops. LinkedIN became more important; I started reading what thought leaders were posting. The platform enabled me to ask questions and engage in meaningful conversations with some of the smartest minds around the world. I couldn't believe how helpful LinkedIN was and was so grateful that I started contributing my thoughts to the community. The UX community was 100x smaller back then but 100x closer and more supportive. I felt like I incurred a debt that I could never repay.
Over the next few years I practiced and honed my experience design skills at a couple different shops before I learnt a new lesson. I learnt that working for a single shop gave them control over what I worked on and who I worked with. This was the golden-age of UX freelancing; there were only a few of us in Canada and my cup was overflowing with work. I got to work with some of the biggest and best organizations on the planet and LinkedIN became more important. My network grew exponentially. One contract would lead to a dozen new connections; and when those connections left to join new organizations I got introduced to a bunch of new people and practices. In just a few years my skills and tool-kit just exploded. New people wanting into the industry were asking me for advice. Without realizing it, I became a mentor and LinkedIN became more important.
It was 2012 when one of my freelance engagements turned into the biggest opportunity of my life. I was engaged by General Electric to provide UX design support on some R&D projects that were in mid-stream. The team enjoyed working with me and were vocal about it. The VP was a fan, and one of the smartest people I've ever known, and became an advocate for getting me onboard in an exclusive way. After some discussion, we came to agreement that I would form a company and be added to their list of trusted vendors with a year-long exclusive contract. I was thrilled; Hostile Sheep was something I was thinking about for a while and wasn't sure how to get it off the ground. I took the opportunity, built a team, defined a unique business model, and developed the core values that have guided the firm to this day. LinkedIN became more important.
With the support of General Electric, Hostile Sheep was able to learn (first hand) from some of the biggest and brightest minds around. We learnt complex frameworks and methods from their inventors; something we couldn't have ever done on our own. We refined our processes and grew our skill sets until we fully realized our value proposition. Through the lens of Hostile Sheep I gave everything back to the community; all of our processes, all of our documents, everything we learnt was an open book. I was speaking at events, creating educational curriculum, lecturing and teaching at several universities; all while applying what I was learning on new projects. LinkedIN became more important.
In 2016 GE restructured and made us an offer; we could join them or they would run out the contract and wouldn't renew. After another existential moment, we decided to persist and I doubled-down on Hostile Sheep. I devoted every waking hour to the company and we grew from 1 client to 17 clients in the first year. The team knew we caught lightning in a bottle and the sky was the limit. But the company was a reflection of me and I never wanted Hostile Sheep to be about making money; I wanted it to make an impact. So, I did a 180-degree-turn with reference to growth. We turned away from 80% of our clients that were measuring success by profits alone. I made the decision to take on clients that measured success in a more meaningful way, even at the expense of profit. We made huge inroads in the government, healthcare and educational industries. We optimized and streamlined our business model so that charities and start-ups could afford our services. This was also about the time LinkedIN began to change.
Microsoft acquired LinkedIN for $26bn in 2016 and things started changing shortly thereafter. I can't say it was the acquisition per se, it may have just been the market or the size of the social network, but all of a sudden the content I was sharing wasn't getting the kind of traction it was getting before. LinkedIN started promoting different kinds of content; content that became known as 'click bait'. People on LinkedIN started changing too; they were learning how to game the system to get their content promoted. People also started using LinkedIN to establish themselves as thought leaders; not to give back to the community or learn from the community, but to ask the community for validation. This shift was concerning and I tried to adapt to the new face of LinkedIN.
September 28th, 2017 was the last time I wrote an "article" on LinkedIN. As much as I enjoyed writing and sharing my ideas, I absolutely loved the conversations that were sparked from the articles I wrote. When they stopped getting the traction, they stopped sparking discussions and I felt like they stopped being valuable to the community. I felt heartbroken, again, to move away from something that brought me so much. But that wasn't the end of LinkedIN's changes.
Over the next few years I was still active on LinkedIN but I shifted from writing long-form content to writing bite-sized content in "post" form and in "comment" form. It was hard to fully express complex concepts in posts and was even harder to have thoughtful discussions in comment threads. Posts evolved and people started writing them "for the algorithm" instead of writing them to help a community. I tried to adapt to this new way of using LinkedIN.
LinkedIN has always been a business 'social network' but there was a time it supported the advancement of knowledge; generating new business or establishing ones-self as a thought leader flowed out of the goal of advancing knowledge. There was always a job search (digital resume) component but there was a time when people valued the opportunity to show growth and progress over exhibiting their expertise. Those who know me, know I'm a perpetual student and seek opportunities to learn whenever I can find them. I value this perspective in others; in fact, those who believe they know it all and have nothing left to learn from others embody a perspective I resent in the strongest possible way. LinkedIn began to foster groups with this perspective.
The LinkedIN I knew and loved was disintegrating; I felt like a good friend was being taken away from me and I needed to fight to save it. I began to resist where LinkedIN was headed; I felt the need to stop the rampant propagation of misinformation, slap-down click bait, and express my frustration with the massive amount of ego-stroking that was going on. The social network I had valued for so long, the one that helped build my career, had turned me into an angry, jaded, human being. The place I once felt safe to learn, share and question had become an unsafe place full of long-tailed-cats in a room full of rocking chairs; just waiting to attack with their backs constantly up. No longer could you be the least bit critical about something an individual posts; no matter how wrong or opinionated it was. Unless you were in full agreement, the delicate feelings of posters could get hurt and a meaningful critique could turn into a schoolyard fight. I was entangled in several, absolutely gut wrenching, misunderstandings with people I merely wanted to offer my (differing) perspective to.
In August 2021 I made the decision to stop being an active part of LinkedIN. I turned into someone I didn't recognize. I wasn't interested in educating and learning, I was focused on stopping my beloved social network from being corrupted. I needed to step back and rediscover myself; I threw myself into my work, I developed new concepts and learned new frameworks from experts around the world. I had to pay $1000's to attend classes, conferences, Zoom sessions, workshops and knowledge exchanges. I began mentoring individuals and joined an online mentoring platform where I found an eager group of voracious learners who I could support. I guest lectured whenever I got the chance. All the while keeping my thumb on the pulse of LinkedIN and the people I cared so much about. It was excruciatingly hard to stay silent and observe, but I said absolutely nothing for almost three years. I rediscovered my passion for the industry. I surrounded myself with truly brilliant people that were changing the industry. I surrounded myself with passionate students who valued what I had to share and taught me more than I could ever express. My business pruned off some dead and dying leaves and grew in ways I never expected. My time away from LinkedIN may have been the most bittersweet of my life but it reignited my entrepreneurial spirit in such a significant way, I re-launched Hostile Sheep with a new model and new focus.
In March of 2024, I announced the launch of the new Hostile Sheep on LinkedIN. Whether I liked it or not, I was back and I wanted to find out what had changed; and wanted to reconnect with the folks I had only been observing for the last few years. What I found was a deeply broken LinkedIN that obviously continued its downward spiral during the time I was away:
- Algorithm 'gaming' had become an art form. The quality of content being shared had developed a LinkedIN 'style' that was built to gain traction instead of advance knowledge.
- Everyone turned into an expert, speaker, coach, leader and mentor. Whether people had 20 years of experience or two years, everyone was positioning themselves as thought leaders.
- The signal to noise ratio had deteriorated to the point that a person could spend hours to find the few nuggets of wisdom still being shared in the ocean of misinformation and misunderstood opinions.
- The rise of AI was more present than ever before. A large percentage of content being shared was simply AI generated content. While not fooling experts, students were being fooled into following 'experts' who really know little (or nothing) about the subject matter; making it impossible to ask clarifying questions or engage with them in meaningful ways.
- Plagiarism and derivative content was being presented with more pride than ever before. Posts from 'popular' accounts gain incredible numbers of likes for posting content that was clearly not created by them. Simple Google searches can find the original source and are clearly not being done by people on the platform.
- The defensive nature of people posting content has grown to an unreal point. Unless your posting aggressively positive comments, they risk being seen as 'undermining' and risk being attacked or diminished by the original poster.
- AI generated articles have risen to spark discussion but have fallen into the same patterns other posts have fallen into. (1) they tend to be focused on 'click bait' type questions that don't really address root problems that individuals face, (2) they tend to surface 3 or 4 categories of 'popular' responses while burying real insights in a "what else to consider" category, and (3) they tend to award 'top voice' badges to individuals who contribute frequently, regardless of quality. It's clear that many contributions were written by Chat GPT or similar.
- Everything needs to be short or have a 'too long didn't read' (TLDR) summary. It's not just about bite-sized content anymore; there seems to be a disdain for the written word. If people can't infer meaning from an image or by skimming a post in a few seconds, it's basically worthless.
- The real (OG) experts and industry leaders, not the LinkedIN-famous people, have become islands of wisdom drifting hopelessly in oceans of regurgitated platitudes. Few of them still care enough to engage in meaningful discord and have resorted to posting re-packed ideas they've been sharing for years, excerpts from their books, and slides/diagrams from talks they give.
- The UX industry, the industry I know and love, doesn't resemble what I've seen and experienced in the real world. The UX industry was flooded by graphic designers who wanted to make more money. They took a two week course and changed their job title, demanding a raise. They care more about padding, colour choice, typography and proper spacing than how people behave or think; and they often misunderstand foundational usability, information architecture and user experience principles.
Don't get me wrong, I love connecting with my friends and peers regarding our careers and our ideas. I love learning from those who are still sharing innovative and novel ideas. I love being able to shape and mentor emerging minds and connecting the brilliant to the brilliant. There's still something about LinkedIN that reminds me of that old social network I fell in love with.
So, I don't know if I'll choose to stay with LinkedIN. I don't think I can ever completely leave, so I think it's about pruning off those dead leaves that keep making the bad-stuff visible and sapping my soul. I think it's going to be about finding more of those islands of wisdom and those other perpetual students and engaging with them. With all the wrong I've seen in LinkedIN, I still have hope that it can make me smile more than it makes me frown.