On LinkedIn fatigue, online slop, and saying goodbye to all that

This issue of Marketing Fix is about giving up, finally and gladly, on LinkedIn.

I believe that the social platform has reached its final phase – end of civilisation, if you please – where 80% of posts & comments are generated by AI bots and people behaving like bots.

First, some thoughts on how we got there. Later, a hopeful note on rediscovering meaning.

As always, thx for reading and forwarding to others.

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How LinkedIn went from "less is more" to "more is less"

Back in May 2024, my LinkedIn feed was a waterfall of grindset and broetry.

"Five things I wish I'd known when starting my first company..."

"Once I learned to say no..."

"Never say never."

Over the next months, while Instagram was having its brat summer, thousands of aspiring business influencers were sweating out three LinkedIn posts per day in content-creator bootcamps.

Had it not been for so many content programs, simultaneously producing self-proclaimed authors (many of whom went on to launch their own programs, oh the downwards spiral), it’s unlikely the cringy posts would have pulled so much traction.

The reason why the posts featuring selfies and life-changing yet mysteriously identical stories of dropping out of college, landing dream jobs, and talking to strangers on streets got all that engagement is that commenting, too, was a checklist exercise towards LinkedIn stardom.

In hindsight, the definition of brat—accepting your imperfections while embracing chaos—seems also like a pertinent descriptor for the pre-ChatGPT era LinkedIn zeitgeist.

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Perhaps, 2024 will go down in the annals as the height of civilisation LinkedIn.

Ruminating about my recent LinkedIn fatigue which covers all the available forms of the sensation (physical, mental, emotional, social, moral), I thought of a concept that applies to any social media platform.

In the early days, there’s the online forum-like stage of less is more, where a small community of users engages in a genuine conversation.

This is followed by the general-adoption phase of more is more, where still few enough people publish quality posts, resulting in high engagement, rapid follower growth, and, ideally, income.

Finally, as the barrier of entry gets lower (new tools, free guides) and becoming an influencer is democratically available to anyone, we arrive at the era of more is less, a.k.a. the end of civilisation.

This made me think of the final sequence of Antonioni's Zabriskie Point (1970) – just beautiful!

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Swimming drowning in online slop

Obviously, I’m not the first to note that AI-generated content is shaping the world for worse by impoverishing it of original ideas and intelligent meaning.

​Research published in late 2024 reported that as of October 2024, ca 54% of long-form posts on LinkedIn were AI-generated.

In a recent New York Magazine article, Max Read wrote about the “rising tide of slop [that] has begun to swamp most of what we think of as the internet, overrunning the biggest platforms with cheap fakes and drivel, seeming to crowd out human creativity and intentionality with weird AI crap.”

In my LinkedIn feed, the slop overtake manifests in thousands of posts promising AI prompts, cheatsheets, and breakdowns of X-billion revenue success stories.

Yes, you can do all three in a single post.

The awful thing—or at least what’s so disgusting about it for me—is not that 90% of these posts are copies of other posts, rewritten with AI.

It’s that thousands of people are commenting “prompt” to get access without ever questioning whether the author has ever achieved anything other than 1,000 comments under a LinkedIn post.

It’s that everyone now believes that accessing a half-page Google Doc with an AI prompt will make them rich and famous in 10 minutes instead of hours of real hard work, not to mention thought.

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Comment “Vibe marketing”

What really got me was the flood of posts promising AI prompts for auto-generating ad creatives with the latest ChatGPT version.

According to the so-called vibe marketers, you can make millions by selling anything. All you need is AI-generated ads.

Under a single LinkedIn post, 14,260 people decided: Me, too, can create 20 GREAT ads in 10 mins WITH JUST VIBES.

Sorry but LOL.
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Here's what's ironic about this.

As someone who's spent millions on Meta ad campaigns for 30+ brands, I can tell in 10 seconds that none of the creatives featured in that post would perform well.

All lack a strong value proposition, a promo offer, and a big fat CTA button, to point out only three most obvious shortcomings.

Sometimes, I’ve commented “prompt” out of sheer interest.

Whenever I test those prompts, the resulting ad images are worse than what I could design on Figma in 10 minutes. They're literally useless.

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One more rant and then I’m done, promise.

Last week, i saw a LinkedIn post by a marketing expert saying she booked 20 new leads by commenting under 100 LinkedIn posts over 5 days.

I checked her past 5 days' comments. (Yes, I do regret wasting my time on this.)

There were eight (not 100), and I can’t possibly imagine which one of the “Exiting news!” or “Thanks for sharing your insights” exclamations got anyone interested in hiring her.

As I couldn't find the post for this essay, I searched LinkedIn for "20 meetings booked" and realised it was yet another post in yet another copy-and-AI craze.

This is depressing in so many ways.

One of them being that shitposting 5-7 times per week works.

Or does it?

It works for getting likes, comments, and followers.

Does it bring new leads, deals, and clients? – Not in the world I'm living in. (More on this later.)

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Preach without practice

What happened to "Practice what you preach" – a LinkedIn post opener that just 12 months ago, one would regularly encounter?

It was flipped into preach without practice.

The overwhelming tsunami of LinkedIn content has led to a point where seeing a LinkedIn post that claims 20 new leads in 10 minutes, instead of questioning the author's sanity we skip to the comments and type "cheatsheet."

Don't get me wrong. It's not all awful.

There are brilliant subject matter experts using LinkedIn as their primary marketing & growth channel.

Like Maja Voje and Kyle Polar. Like Emily Sundberg and Rachel Karten.

What makes a difference—what makes these authors’ posts authentic and useful—is that they all have 10y+ experience in the industry, and writing a business newsletter is (mostly) their full-time job.

The problem is people with no real experience framing themselves as industry experts at 10min per day.

And who can blame them?

They’ve paid for a content creator workshop.

They’re following the exact checklist & AI prompts catalogue provided by their (self)-qualified coach.

They’ve commented “prompt” under a LinkedIn post with hundreds of comments and must now use it to create more, more, more content—a horrible word in itself.
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Most importantly, the posts they generate with Chat GPT or Claude AI or whatever will get hundreds of likes and comments from real people. People like you and me.

No wonder, Sherlock, that this economy of fantastical proficiency leads to content that

a) focuses on cheap virality;

b) is a copy of someone else’s post, which is a copy of someone else’s post, which is… written by AI.
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I just can't (do LinkedIn) anymore

I haven’t been able to post on LinkedIn for about two weeks.

It’s not that I’ve lacked ideas.

Rather, I’ve felt a sort of vertiginous revulsion every time I open it in a Chrome window.

The feed is full of false promises, fake expertise, and thousands of people engaging with these.

Why would anyone want to participate, or even contribute?

To learn the latest best practices, build industry relationships, get new clients... You know why!

And all the hours spent on posting, commenting, and liking do pay off, don't they?

Not in my experience.

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Goodbye to all that

I tried active LinkedIn posting from January to April 2025.

Perhaps I didn't try hard enough – I never reached the 7 posts + 50 comments per week schedule. In a way, I admire the people who can spend several hours daily on the platform. Superhuman stamina.

Posting on LinkedIn helped to grow my newsletter readership, albeit slower than writing a guest article for another newsletter did.

The positive thing about creating these free resources is that they were genuinely helpful for other marketers & founders.

But I might as well have shared them in this newsletter or my blog.

Meanwhile, all my course sales and consulting requests over past 6 months came via referrals and my newsletter (mostly pre-2025 readers).

Not a single new consulting project or course sale came via Linkedin as the first touchpoint.

Instead of spending hours on brainstorming and creating “comment for access” free checklists and libraries, plus more hours designing, writing, and publishing LinkedIn posts…

… I would much rather spend 10h writing a long-form blog article. Or a guest post. Or a newsletter. Or working on an actual project for a client.

Another observation: At least for me, LinkedIn posts got much higher engagement 5-6 months ago compared to April-May 2025.

Every marketer I've asked about their LinkedIn engagement confirmed it has dropped.

With more posts and less value, it'll soon be more efficient to run LinkedIn ads (vs spending billable hours chasing organic reach).

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I'm giving up on LinkedIn but... Should you?

In a time when we’re told “you can be doing it all,” doing it all means you can’t do any of it well.

One of the mantras I kept repeating to the participants of my DYI Marketing Audit course was to choose 2-3 marketing channels and focus on scaling them.

As I wrote in a Marketing Fix issue on social media, you should either go ALL IN or ALL OUT on any marketing channel.

We're surrounded by so much noise.

There's too much of everything.

The only reasonable response—at least one that I can think of—is to decide what genuinely matters.

The rest you just filter out.

I'm not going to delete my LinkedIn account – I'll need it for keeping in touch with peers, clients, and colleagues.

But I'm not going to create anything for merely posting on Linkedin.

When I publish a new blog article or newsletter, I'll share it on LinkedIn as well.

When I have a hot take on something, e.g. Bolt's brand team flopping their latest campaign because of laziness and cultural ignorance​, I'll rant about it.

I returned to the crossed-out lines after an evening walk, having realised that I should go full cold turkey on LinkedIn. It only adds anxiety to my life. So I will, at least for the next 3 months. (I use the Texts app on Mac for my LI inbox, so I won't miss any messages.)

I expect to have a lot more focus time for writing newsletters & blog articles, creating LinkedIn ad strategies & visuals for my clients, planning online courses & conducting marketing audits.

Perhaps, you too have something more meaningful to do with your time than competing with AI and human bots for second-rate attention.

Why not do it?

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🪡 Needles in a haystack

The special shout-out section for things that cut through the internet noise + what I've been reading, listening, watching, liking, thinking.

I'm in the mood for a non-business issue of Needles – for another thing that I'm planning to have more time on is writing prose poetry & catching up with my pile of unread books.

🪡 There's a new Wes Anderson in town. As per the IMDB description, The Phoenician Scheme is a "story of a family and a family business." Even if Anderson's films have gradually gotten less great, I'll give it a go at the Barbican cinema this weekend.

🪡 There's also a new Sorrentino film in cinemas. Which I actually want to see even more. My primary expectation of Parthenope is to be reminded how beautiful the world is: the world that exists outside of your laptop screen.

🪡 The garden, the garden, a paraphrase of Iris Murdoch's novel The Sea, The Sea which is a brilliant book (and an easy, amusing read) but also the place where I'm sitting right now. This mention is to suggest that you spend one weekend day completely off screen. See friends, take long walks. After all, it's summer in the real world.

🪡 The Boys by Leo Robson is what I'm currently reading and many of our common friends rave about. It's a novel about two brothers trailing London during the 2012 Olympics while launching into excellent Salingeresque dialogues and musings on friendship, family, and love.

🪡 Wrong Norma by Anne Carson is one of the books off my to-read pile that I picked up this week: lyric essays and vignettes by one of my favourite poets of all time. Quite an experimental one – get at your own risk.

🪡 10+10 book recommendations. I created this list of 10+10 personal-favourite marketing and literary books to motivate my Marketing Audit course participants. Those who finished their audit in time got an Amazon gift card, along with this list of book recs. Many of them did push through and now I'm wondering if they got any of these books. (If you're reading, let me know!)

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🪀 Fix your marketing game I'm going on a long summer break from June 30, to finish my collection of prose poems and perhaps even begin a novel. You can reach out until May 30 to hire me for a quick marketing consultation or audit project. Hire me as your hands-on growth advisor: ​See the newly-updated page about how you can bring me onboard. BACK live: B2B Ad Creatives course ​Master the Strategy of High-conversion B2B Creatives Free resources: ​Notion Library of 80 marketing audit questions ​Figma Library of 155+ LinkedIn ads by leading B2B brands' ads

Thanks for reading!
Have a good one, and stay (almost) clear of AI.

Karola