LinkedIn needs a restart...

... or is it just me?

I recently finished listening to No Filter: The Inside Story of Instagram, by Sarah Frier. It's a highly engaging story on Instagram: from its early days until it reached its current status as one of the most dominant apps on our phones with over 1 billion monthly active users. Although the book is about Instragram, its most intriguing moments are when Facebook and its CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, are in focus. Zuckerberg is portrayed as a growth-obsessed big brother that gradually suffocates Instagram's spirit and originality for the benefit of user and revenue growth. At the end, the need to maintain revenue-generating eyeballs longer and longer on the screen, as with Facebook, trumps all and drives the founders to seek new horizons in September 2018.

Ironically, right around the time that Instragam's founders called it quits, I was deep into another book, Make Time, by Jake Knapp and John Zeratzky, and applied one of their many tips: A distraction-free phone. I deleted all of my social media apps (Facebook, Instragram, Twitter, LinkedIn) and haven't re-installed them since. I don't know how many hours of distraction I've saved since then, but one of these networks has still managed to maintain a bit of my eyeball time until now: LinkedIn.

While I did remove the app from my phone, I still kept returning to the LinkedIn site on my desktop, as part of my work routine. The logic is that this is the one network that has professional value. I'm aware of the irony I'm writing this post here, and not on medium, but I'm really close to pulling the plug on LinkedIn, or at least its feed. With every passing day it copies more and more attention-grabbing, revenue-focused features that drain it of it's initial value. So here's my rant on why LinkedIn needs a restart:

• I'm sick of ads and distracting videos on my feed.
• Continuous learning is great, but no, you do not need to share your diploma in a post every-time you take a 2-hour online course.
• Similarly, I don't really care about your 2-year work anniversary.
• I love where I work, Hilti, but 80% of what I see on LinkedIn is about it, due to colleagues liking, commenting or re-sharing posts. Thanks, but Yammer is sufficient for that itch.
• Have you heard of the saying "don't talk to strangers?", here's the LinkedIn equivalent: do not ask to connect with me if we don't know each other, unless there's a clear context or reason - thank you.
• And to all of you "wanna-be" bloggers in my network: I won't say it to your face, and I'll like your article like all the others, but your writing sucks - there is no "filter" here to turn it beautiful, so just post an Instastory instead and go back to work! ;)

So, is it just me?