Hey LinkedIn, I have an exciting new opportunity just for you. You’ve become the last digital platform standing as your rivals have succumbed to what the author Corey Doctorow has rightly dubbed “enshitification”, the process by which once-useful platforms are destroyed by their own business models.

X has literally flushed itself down the toilet on which too many of its users spent their time tweeting; TikTok is facing national security bans over its opaque state-controlled algorithm; Meta has ordained that its platform will soon be liberated from journalistic fact.

Bound up in an excess of niceness, LinkedIn’s strength is its weakness.Credit: Marija Ercegovac/iStock

These platforms are united in their reliance on noise and division to feed their insatiable desire to harvest our attention and resell it back to us as a constant stream of marketing.

In contrast, LinkedIn, you are a more pedestrian, polite and professional expression of our digital selves, a place where we put on the work tie, the tailored jacket and the sensible shoes. People on LinkedIn have a real identity, an education, a backstory; they are not nameless trolls who can vent and attack others with the impunity of anonymity.

These norms have created an environment in which we are conscious of what we say, how we react to others. The conformity is to be supportive of others, to be mutually reinforcing. It is a curated extension of our CVs.

Because when we are in our work gear we all play it safe, never sure when an opinion could affect our long-term careers or the in-house social media policy.

But LinkedIn, your strength is also your weakness. Without wanting to be offensive, you have a tendency to be a bit suck-arse. And this excess in niceness makes you nearly as horrible a place to be as the other digital bin-fires.

Too much of what passes for engagement is twee, cloying humblebragging, where every average PowerPoint becomes “amazing thought leadership”, where every meeting is a staged photo-opp and where any point of friction is politely glossed over.