LinkedIn is the best and worst place on the internet right now

AI made it both.

LinkedIn is having a strange moment.

It has never been more useful for finding your next customer. And it has never been more unpleasant to spend time on. Both of those things are true at once, and both of them are because of AI.

There are still humans on LinkedIn

If you sell to other businesses, and you want to reach human decision-makers, LinkedIn is the best place left on the internet to reach real humans. The people you want are there, they are reachable, and you can get your message in front of them in a way no other channel can match anymore.

But everyone’s chasing those humans

The flip side is that that same reachability has been discovered by everyone else selling to businesses, and they all have the tools to act on that knowledge - so they’re running automated outreach tools, AI writing assistants, and sending personalised message sequences at a scale that makes it physically impossible for them to be personalised. The result is a feed full of machines doing impressions of people, and a connection request inbox full of pitches from strangers who talk with familiarity but know nothing about you.

So LinkedIn is the best of places and the worst of places, and it’s all because of AI.

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Mass LinkedIn outreach comes at a cost

These merchants of LinkedIn outreach think they’ve found some sort of cheat code. They’ve got their ChatGPT subscription and their LinkedIn automation tool. They’ve written a sequence, they’ve set up the automations, and now they’re sitting back, having a cocktail, waiting for the leads to come in. One tool, one sequence, a thousand messages a week, all at the click of a button. And all for less than the price of that cocktail.

But it isn’t free. There’s a long-term cost to the brand. Every templated pitch and obviously automated message is people learning, in real time, who not to trust. These LinkedIn lead gen specialists are training their own markets to delete them on sight.

And that’s not the only cost. Most of this activity is in breach of LinkedIn’s terms: the automation tools, the scraping, the personalisation at scale. The platform is well within its rights to restrict or remove accounts that do this (and it does - Reddit is full of tales from ex-LinkedIn-outreach-specialists who have had to find new ways to make a living. Anyone who engages in this kind of LinkedIn lead generation is risking the account itself, the one place that gave them a direct line to their buyers, for the sake of a bunch of messages that nobody wanted in the first place.

Which is exactly why being human works

The Merchants of Slop have done us all a favour. They’ve made it trivially easy for a real human to stand out.

When the feed is wall-to-wall machines, it has never been easier to get someone’s attention. You just have to show up as yourself. A connection request with a real reason in it. An InMail that reads as if one person wrote it to one person. A comment that actually engages with what someone said. A repost with a genuine thought attached.

These things are rare now. And because they’re rare, when you do them, people notice. The bar has been set so low by everyone automating their way to the bottom that simply being a recognisable human clears it. Which is the whole reason that strategic, human LinkedIn lead generation still outperforms anything an automation tool can do (and by the way, you don’t need to automate your outreach because if your outreach is targeted, you don’t need to reach out to thousands of people every month - you’ll get the same number of leads by doing considered, thoughtful, targeted outreach to a handful of genuine potential prospects)

So that’s LinkedIn. The best place on the internet to reach the people you want, and the worst place to spend your time, both at once, both because of AI.

But the two are connected. The reason it’s unbearable is the same reason it’s full of opportunity. Every automated message, every machine pretending to be a person, every pitch from a stranger who knows nothing about you, lowers the bar for everyone who’s willing to just be human. The slop isn’t the only problem. It’s the opening.

So show up as yourself. It’s rarer than it’s ever been, and it’s never worked better. And if you’re on LinkedIn and you’re a real human, send me a connection request.