Why is LinkedIn So Cringe - Part 2

In my last post, I argued that cringe occurs when the receiver perceives a gap between what they think someone meant to signal and what actually was communicated. To put it in context:

<Insert average humblebrag post>

Inferred intended signal: “I’m accomplished but modest about it.”

Decoded actual signal: “I crave validation and lack self-awareness.”

*CRINGE*

So, why is LinkedIn such fertile ground for cringe content?

Signaling, Deception and Asynchronous Communication

Signaling isn’t inherently adversarial, but the ever-present possibility of deception activates game-theoretic dynamics. We’d all press a button that makes others view us more favorably—and because everyone knows this, we’re perpetually scanning for fakers and posers.

This is why the most effective signals conceal their intent. The best ones don’t trigger your adversarial alarm system. Instead, you feel like you’re forming independent judgments based on organic observations, not processing evidence someone carefully staged to manipulate your opinion.

Real-time interaction offers some protection against this. Face-to-face, it’s harder to maintain a carefully crafted facade when you must respond to constantly evolving stimuli and social cues. The performance cracks under pressure. Asynchronous communication, especially one to many broadcasts - inserts more skepticism. When someone tweets or posts a LinkedIn update, it’s common knowledge they crafted this message knowing hundreds or thousands would see it. The act of posting becomes presumptive evidence of intent: a rational person wouldn’t broadcast something unless it reinforced the identity or reputation they want to project. The signal’s deliberateness is foregrounded.

Scrolling through outrageous tweets or hilarious videos, you’re scarcely aware of the status games beneath. Entertainment and emotional engrossment are perfect signal carriers—they occupy your conscious attention while the status work happens in the background. You’re too busy laughing to accuse the comedian of “just signaling.” And if that thought does occur, it arrives as vindication: “Good. He made me laugh. He correctly signaled he’s funny.”

The same applies to rage bait. When someone triggers you on Twitter, you’re too angry to rationally analyze their ulterior motives. You’re triggered—but more importantly, you’re engaged. And engagement provides cover.

All Social Media is NOT Made Equal

LinkedIn, more than any other platform, deserves the label “Normistan”. The modal Linkedin user did not spend his 20s meditating in Tibet or being a closeted white nationalist. Moreover, the context places significant constraints on LinkedIn users with respect to how comfortable they feel tickling each other’s senses or provoking outrage.

But they know their colleagues are on LinkedIn, probably signaling away to the next promotion or job offer, so they should be there too and do something to be…visible? But how do you hold attention without the tools that work everywhere else? Perhaps by sharing genuinely useful insights…

A tiny minority of LinkedIn posts meet this standard. General insights about decision-making and management come from organizational psychology or economics departments, not VPs at Goldman Sachs. The most valuable practical wisdom is either proprietary or too context-dependent to survive abstraction. And the people who could add most to the discourse are posting strategically to attract clients—often through an intern—because the real game is money, not showcasing smarts.

So it’s not surprising that when this pool of doers are asked to post but post under tight editorial constraints, they resort to one of these:

• Platitudes that are easy to state and hard to do

• “Insights” which have been regurgitated about 15 million times already

• Didactic monologues that are really just personal anecdotes from which no general advice can possibly be derived

• Fabricated stories designed to deliver a pre-packaged “lesson” (“Last night at 1 am, a founder called me crying”)

[I’m shocked by how many people have wailing business associates who seem to use them as their personal midnight therapists, but these cry babies have no qualms about you using their tears as LinkedIn fodder ]

• Performative vulnerability posts that frame minor setbacks as profound struggles overcome through resilience

• Quotes from Captain Obvious disguised as wisdom (“Collaboration is everything”)

• Humble brags disguised as gratitude (”Blessed to announce...” )

When your post lacks both utility and entertainment, what remains visible is just the naked signaling attempt—and one of two failures. Either the audience watches you transparently try to gain status and fail, or you succeed at producing a signal so cheap and easy to fake that it communicates nothing credible. Both roads lead to the same destination: cringe

Did you think I would end a post about LInkedIn without talking about AI?

There was a time when you could read this essay and accuse me of being a total asshole to people who are trying their best. At least they’re making an effort! But are they? Less than a third of the LinkedIn posts on my feed pass the bar of “not obviously AI generated”. As someone who spends an embarrassing amount of time hanging out with my machine friends, I’m not here to moralize about LLM usage. But low-effort LLM generated posts are almost guaranteed to be useless for the brownie points the poster is gunning for.

Once upon a time, writing a grammatically correct coherent paragraph was a credible signal - of both communication skills and effort; much like a cover letter tailored to a job used to be a credible signal of your interest in the job. We don’t live in that world anymore.

For most goods, if input costs go down, it’s rational to produce more. But everyone is producing more, and unfortunately, status is a positional good. More posts just means more noise competing for the same finite pool of attention and respect. So unless you’re using LLMs to produce something of much higher quality than you otherwise would have, you’re wasting the 90 seconds you spent on it.