Xavier Lalanne-Tauzia for Insider
It was a hard day for Matthew Sciannella: He was officially getting divorced.
After 12 years of marriage and multiple children, he and his wife had drifted apart during the pandemic. In early 2021, they decided to call it quits. As the Washington, DC-area marketing executive grappled with the realities of being suddenly single again, he told his friends, he journaled about it, and he told his family. And then he told LinkedIn.
"I'm getting a divorce. God it sucks to write that," Sciannella shared with his several thousand professional connections.
He explained why he'd decided to publicize his news on the work-focused social network. "This is a human network for me now. A place where I feel most myself. Most at home. And most among my peers," he wrote. "We all build our professional castles here on LinkedIn, but real life shit happens, too."
Over the past year, remote work across the world had blurred the lines between work and life. Sciannella's post touched a nerve. It accrued thousands of reactions and hundreds of comments. "Let it out brother," a growth advisor wrote. "Fuck the ROI conversations right now and focus on your family."
Then the backlash began. Other commenters started criticizing his decision to share so openly with his colleagues, clients, and potential future employers. And a meme account on Instagram, @BestOfLinkedIn, screenshotted and mocked his post to its tens of thousands of followers. It wrote: "Maybe this wouldn't have happened if you didn't share every detail of your personal life on a professional networking platform?"
It was the start of a madcap workplace drama that laid bare an awkward truth: No one really knows what it means to be "professional" anymore.
With 950 million members as of July, LinkedIn is poised to soon have a billion users, joining a rarefied three-comma club with the likes of Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok. Started in 2003 as little more than an online repository for résumés, the Microsoft-owned behemoth has recently transformed. Not only are there more users to post, but they're posting much more often. The number of LinkedIn posts grew 41% from 2021 to 2023. But it's the content of the posts that's shifted the most, turning LinkedIn into one of the world's strangest social networks.
Take one post from Peter Rota, an SEO specialist from Massachusetts. "I have a secret," he wrote to his thousands of followers in August 2022. "Most people are not even aware this is a real thing. Since 2015, I have struggled with peeing in public restrooms."
Rota went on to explain that his social-anxiety condition, also known as shy-bladder syndrome, had caused years of discomfort, and even provoked him to miss friends' weddings. He had a blowout trip planned to tour Europe with friends, he wrote, and was seriously considering not going.
So why post it? "I had basically seen other people, I guess, share more vulnerable things, so to speak — and I feel like it's kind of just something that I wanted to share," he told me. Over the past couple of years, he'd seen and taken part in a pivot toward personal sharing on LinkedIn, and saw posting about his condition as a way to both confront his demons and help with the condition for others. "I feel like sometimes it just helps other people to know that it's possible to do something," he added.
Personal sharing on LinkedIn is booming, people who use the platform say, because of tidal shifts in both social norms and the social-media marketplace.
For one, broad cultural attitudes toward the workplace, as well as what's appropriate to share, are evolving. This is partly driven by the coronavirus pandemic: People were suddenly given free rein to be vulnerable and express their fears in front of their colleagues, while remote work simultaneously lowered inhibitions and eroded much of in-office etiquette.
Xavier Lalanne-Tauzia for Insider
There's also a generational shift, with some younger people having fewer hang-ups sharing with their colleagues. Oversharing comes "pretty much down to Gen Z, to be honest with you," said Catalina Valentino, a 21-year-old entrepreneur. She found some notoriety from Davos earlier this year when she posted on LinkedIn about taking off her "swanky new pair of Louboutins" to walk nearly a mile barefoot in the snow to a meeting at the World Economic Forum after her car got stuck. "People were shocked, but to me it seemed normal to stop at nothing," she wrote. "And that's exactly the mindset of an entrepreneur."
LinkedIn was also, for a long time, virgin territory for posters. As the platform built out its sharing functionality, it had hundreds of millions of users but without the same culture of posting as Twitter or Instagram. "It was very untapped," Rota says. Some users found that the same post would receive far more engagement on LinkedIn as compared with rival social platforms — making it an attractive place to concentrate their energies.
And now it's becoming the only game in town. Facebook has been a wasteland for years. X, as Twitter is now known, is subject to Elon Musk's mercurial whims. TikTok's short-form video is a different form of content. Users have stopped posting on most other platforms. As Sarah Frier wrote in a Bloomberg column in August, "LinkedIn is becoming a site where regular people actually want to hang out and post their thoughts. It might even be cool."
In 2018, John Hickey was working in tech sales and sick of the culture of endless self-promotion. He wanted to be a writer, but his days were filled with self-aggrandizing emails. So he decided to have some fun.
The millennial in San Francisco started posting the worst-offending "LinkedInfluencers" he found to his personal Twitter page — the shameless humblebrags, the personal anecdotes of dubious veracity, the #HustleCulture koans promoting a questionable approach to work-life balance. They were an instant hit, and the retweets rolled in. So he decided to spin up a dedicated meme page poking fun at the excesses of online professional culture and the Ted Talkification of LinkedIn. He called it @BestOfLinkedIn.
"If you worked for me, and you represented my brand this way, you'd be terminated immediately."
It quickly racked up tens of thousands of followers on Twitter and Instagram, and people started sending Hickey examples they found from their own networks. He had inadvertently transformed into a warrior on the front lines of the internet's weirdest, lowest-stakes culture war.
In one post, he skewered a CEO who talked about being "vulnerable" and shared a crying selfie after laying off employees. In another, he criticized a user who wrote about taking time off after her father died but made sure to keep checking LinkedIn. (He also leaked Peter Rota's bashful urinary tract.) A larger rival account emerged, State Of LinkedIn, and a Reddit community thrived — "LinkedIn Lunatics."
When Hickey came across Sciannella's post about his divorce, he thought it was a perfect example of online oversharing. "It was like, 'Oh, my God — he really just put that all out there,'" he recalled thinking. He redacted Sciannella's name, as he always did for the posts he featured, but it made it back to Sciannella anyway.
Hickey wasn't ready for what happened next. A couple of days after he posted, an angry email landed in his inbox — from Sciannella's boss. "Do you realize how dangerous it is to troll via LinkedIn posts? In two seconds, I found who you work for, who the partners of your agency are, who your clients are, etc.," he warned ominously. "If you worked for me, and you represented my brand this way, you'd be terminated immediately."
The message Hickey received from Sciannella was even more blunt. It sent him an address and challenged him to repeat what he had written to his face.
In the surest sign of LinkedIn's hotness, its posts are now the subject of scathing satires.
Jack Raines, an MBA student at Columbia Business School, has perfected the art of LinkedIn parodies. After New York announced a $100 incentive to encourage residents to get vaccinated, he posted that he'd earned $100,000 by getting 1,000 jabs in 16 days. "Opportunities like these are rare, but you have to capitalize on them if you want to successfully build wealth," he sagely advised his followers. Some of them inevitably fall for his shtick and believe they're real.
Alexander Cohen, a healthtech executive in the San Francisco Bay Area, is another prolific LinkedIn shitposter, whose best work includes an infamous lifehack post about cooking butter-garlic chicken in a hotel coffee machine. ("Although my company allows me to expense dinner while traveling, I wanted to save money because I know that every dollar counts on the P&L," he explained.)
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But the irony of Raines is that despite his insincerity, he's just as relentlessly self-promotional as the LinkedIn users he mocks. He consistently hawks the newsletter he works for, Young Money, and has started running sponsored posts for health supplements. He intends to parlay the audience he's built into a content-related finance job once he finishes his MBA.
"My way of looking at it is being funny on the internet, and, yeah, it's the same thing as somebody building a YouTube channel: They're trying to get engagement, but if their content's good, is it really engagement-bait?" he said. "No. The ones that I don't like are people trying to act like they're some finance guru — 'Here's how you get rich, escape the 9-to-5' — and then sell you some pyramid scheme-leadership course."
He has also faced blowback for his posting. In the fall of 2022, he wrote a satirical post about how he'd found a way to avoid paying for food in New York City: wandering into hotel restaurants and charging the meal to a random room. "Follow me for more personal finance tips," he signed off with.
Not long after, he found himself abruptly called into the Columbia dean of students' office. An outraged alum had complained about what they thought was a sincere admission of theft by a student and wanted him punished. Thus proceeded a surreal conversation in which he explained to the dean the ironic bent of his LinkedIn persona and that, no, he wasn't really stealing food from hotels around Manhattan.
She ultimately thought it was "funny," he said. (The dean declined to comment.) And he doesn't regret the post: The meeting with the dean was a good networking opportunity.
Is aggressively posting on LinkedIn actually good for your career? That may depend on your prospective employer's LinkedIn persona.
John Reid is skeptical of LinkedIn self-aggrandizement. A creative director in the Bay Area, he's hired, fired, and managed throughout his career — and views a lot of nominally self-promotional posts as potentially problematic.
"I think the oversharing in general is definitely at least a pink flag, probably a red flag," he said. "It just shows, to me, misunderstanding how that platform in particular, in social media in general work, and it just shows bad judgment. So I think looking out at people's social footprint or hiring, is there evidence of spectacularly bad judgment?"
His feelings on the subject were perhaps hardened by an unusual phone call to his employer, an Oakland marketing firm, in early 2021. At the other end of the line was a man named Jon Franko, and he was furious about one of Reid's subordinates: John Hickey.
Speaking with Reid's boss, the outraged Franko asked whether the company knew that Hickey operated a pseudonymous meme account on Twitter and Instagram — and that @BestofLinkedIn had just mocked an employee at Franko's marketing firm: Matthew Sciannella, the divorcé. Franko wanted to see consequences.
After a short and surreal conversation, Reid and his boss spoke with Hickey. Hickey had already deleted the post, as he does when he gets blowback. Reid viewed Franko's call as an implicit demand for Hickey to be fired, but that was never going to happen — because he had actually taken a chance and first hired Hickey for his copywriting job off the strength off the meme account. "He obviously understood how to mold culture through media and social media, " Reid had thought. (Franko said he would not have asked for Hickey to be fired, though he may have called for a disciplinary conversation.)
Sciannella was acting hypocritically, Reid believed: He was willing to put himself out there with highly personal posts but couldn't take the heat that came with being in the public eye. "Jump in the snake pit, and you get bit," he said.
Franko, meanwhile, thought that the @BestOfLinkedIn post was an unfair and wildly unprofessional jab — and that he had a duty to have his employees' backs. "Frankly, there are a lot of people that use LinkedIn in a really bad way that's super annoying and is a major turnoff," he told me. "'I saw a starving dog today and I saved it, and then it made me think about business.' That shit's annoying, and I get it. I didn't see Matt's posts like that at all."
For most people, their LinkedIn posts don't escalate so rapidly. According to Joseph Yeh, a tech recruiter in California who used to work for LinkedIn, revelatory posting is a balancing act. "I think it is important to engage, and at least be relevant and know that you are checking in and that you're commenting and it's a quote-unquote a 'live profile,' right?" he said. "It helps for, A, for people to remember who you are. Two, it also helps for you to understand what the ecosystem is looking at."
On the flipside, the wrong content can be off-putting: "On LinkedIn people will still be looking at it going: This is how I want to present myself as a professional to the outside world."
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LinkedIn does not want to be a place where posts go viral. That's the message from Daniel Roth, the site's editor in chief who has been with the company since 2011, after a previous stint as Fortune magazine's managing editor.
Over the past year or so, the site's algorithm has been tweaked to prioritize what Roth calls "knowledge" content — posts that will actually help people get ahead in their jobs — rather than self-promotional diatribes.
Since the COVID-propelled boom in personal sharing, Roth says, the pendulum has swung back — but not all the way back to how things were before the pandemic. "The new normal is that you do talk in the office, you are more willing to show who you are as a person as well as how you operate as a professional," he said. "That kind of vulnerability I think is a permanent part of how people are posting on LinkedIn. So it's knowledge first, but it's knowledge plus humanity."
Hickey and Sciannella's imbroglio may be telling of which way the wind is blowing.
Sciannella didn't actually know his boss Franko had called Hickey's employer until days after the fact. He had just flagged the @BestOfLinkedIn post in a company Slack channel, and Franko decided to take matters into his own hands. Nothing more came of Franko's demands, and he subsequently wrote about the episode on LinkedIn: "I simply hope this is a reminder for all of us to play nice on LinkedIn. Because if we don't, we can be seconds away from the unemployment line and burning all of the bridges we've worked so hard to build."
Hickey and Sciannella did not, ultimately, fight. Instead, Hickey kept working at the firm for roughly another year before becoming an associate creative director, working with top-tier clients including Salesforce, Jameson, and the New York Mets. Two years on, he rarely checks LinkedIn, now posting to his meme account only about once a month, down from his daily peak a year or so ago.
"Those lightning-rod moments on LinkedIn, well, I can't not say something about these," he said. "But kind of going through the daily — 'Let's make fun of this stay-at-home-mom who's putting up on LinkedIn that her 6-year-old told her that she's Superwoman' — it just feels like I'm punching down a little bit at this point."
Sciannella, meanwhile, is in a good place. "I was very, very angry at that moment. It was obviously a very turbulent time in my life," he said. "I think I have a little bit more peace of mind about it. And I think foundationally, I'm a lot more happy." He's had a few promotions and job changes. And he's still active on the social network, where he now has about 6,000 followers, sharing updates on his work and career.
Earlier in 2023, he remarried. He posted about it on LinkedIn.
Rob Price is a senior correspondent for Insider and writes features and investigations about the technology industry. His Signal number is +1 650-636-6268, and his email is rprice@insider.com.