For every 25 posts in my LinkedIn feed, only 5 are posts from Connections. The other 20 are posts are sponsored posts and suggestions. Seems excessive. Anyone else experiencing this? It has led to a quickened, deeper scroll as my eyes filter out the unwelcome items. Sure, some are a nice reveal about a new service, but isn’t the point of LinkedIn more about staying connected with colleagues and learning from each other than getting frazzled by sponsors? It’s free, I get it.

For every 25 posts in my Facebook feed, I see anywhere from 0 to 2 posts from followers. Aside from Groups and a “handover” post from Instagram, I don’t use Facebook much anymore. 

Unfortunately, LinkedIn seems to be following the Facebook model, even with the UI, which seems to have been the inspiration. (I do applaud LinkedIn for adding the Video feed back on the mobile app after having removed it, though.)

The struggle is real for LinkedIn exposure. For my posts, I get about 50 impressions per post. For a 1,700+ followership (not a lot in the LinkedIn world), this is some serious minimal reach. So, why am I being “LinkedOut”? Because my posts suck and don’t resonate with anyone? Possibly. But more importantly, I’m just not playing the game.

The goofy tricks to get the algorithm to favor your post, like tagging a squad of connections and businesses, or commenting thoughtfully often on other posts immediately before you post, seems so disingenuous. The need to “warm up” the algorithm and engage with the posts of your top 10 industry peers list just seems… spammy, ridiculous, deceptive. Just flat out gross and exhausting.

As another source of industry education, but not so much for personal connections, Reddit has 21 subreddits posts per 25 posts in each Community. The experience has much less promoted ads. But most of the ones that I see are often worthwhile, being software or tools that I’d be interested in exploring.

Of course, with Reddit, you exist under the veil of an avatar and display name. Connection are made, but they are not the type that will lead to speaking engagements or conferences meetup lunches. Due to that though, the engagement seems more abundant and honest than LinkedIn. There’s no ulterior motive with the conversations.

For post performance, it’s not even close. I had a marketing tech based post that achieved just a handful of engagement on LinkedIn. With Reddit though, it had over 55k views, 200 upvotes, and 116 comments.

Has anyone else been immersing themselves with Reddit more than LinkedIn to share and gain industry knowledge? I’m a modest user at current, but I’m seeing a lot of structured value with it these days. I love that all interests can be discussed under one hood, from my hobbies (music, writing, and cooking) to multifamily, AI and marketing tech.