Linking Through Hoops

LinkedIn is a social network that deeply confuses me. It’s a social network that sends messages with such a level of vagueness, seemingly to ensure you’ll never figure them out.

It gamifies profile-viewing in a way that feels less professional and more creepy. Plus, it charges money—a lot of money—for most of its features. It’s a hugely successful network, one that some have suggested is the true heir to the “new Twitter” discourse.

But it has an algorithmic problem that must be called out: Despite the fact that “link” is literally in the network’s name, the network has an allergy towards external links.

And increasingly desperate posters and social media marketers are going through comically complex hoops to work around it. Recently, I caught a video from a guy named Mark P. Jung, a consultant whose startup Authority B2B basically teaches companies and desired influencers the road they need to take to attain LinkedIn success. And to me, it seemed like he was trying to sell some magic beans that appear to actually function.

Jung, in a video shared by content marketer Lindsay McGuire, characterizes the changes as “interesting UI decisions” made since Microsoft acquired the company about eight years ago, changes that have invalidated linking hacks used by the network in prior eras.

Jung, in the video of his that drew attention recently. The use of the term “zero-click” is telling.

“Back in the day, people used to sort of get around LinkedIn stuff by just dropping a link in the comments and saying, ‘Hey, check out the comments,’” Jung explains. “Problem is, LinkedIn actually parses if you're the first person to comment in your post, if you're the first person to add a link, even if you actually write, like, the website, but remove the .com and say ‘dot com,’ this algorithm is on to you. It's immediately going to take your post and downrank it.”

So basically, Jung explains the alternative options for sharing a link on LinkedIn as such:

1. Post your thing, making it sufficiently long so the algorithm might enjoy it.
2. Get a little engagement on said thing, so you signal the post has some interest.
3. Wait about 15 or 20 minutes.
4. Edit the post, adding content equivalent to up to 15 percent of the post length, including a URL (which you should shortlink, using a service like Bitly, because every character of the URL counts against the added length).
5. If you did it right, watch number go up.

Does that sound like a lot of work for a single social post? You betcha. You basically have to make this someone’s job because of how long it takes to do. And it’s likely why every post on LinkedIn is like 100,000 words.

To be clear, my beef is not with Jung, who knows how to build social influence and understands the secrets to algorithmic growth. He sounds like someone who spent his time in the salt mines and doesn’t particularly like that it works like this, either. That he knows about it, apparently having uncovered it through a bunch of trial and error with client work, and is sharing his secrets, is fair.

Rather, my issue is with LinkedIn itself, which has clearly put in a lot of work to devalue the link, even more than other networks that do the same thing, like Instagram and Facebook.

At the ISP and mobile provider level, there’s this concept called zero-rating, in which an internet provider provides free access to a selection of sites without the sites counting against the bandwidth limits. (An example of this is T-Mobile limiting users to 480p-quality videos when streaming on mobile, but requiring you to pay an upcharge for higher-quality videos.) It is seen as a controversial workaround for net neutrality rules—though, while it’s still out there, it has become less of a problem in developed nations as internet connections have gotten faster and more unlimited. LinkedIn is doing something similar with its platform, something called zero-click content, as Jung puts it.

The terminology Jung uses is more telling than you might expect—essentially, it basically implies a social media version of zero-rating, which is a very controversial concept on telecom circles. LinkedIn wants you to create more content for its platform, and it wants you to do so at the cost of any outwardly facing content. So, it downranks anything it sees as damaging to that goal, even if it means breaking the original point of the internet in the process. It is essentially the same concept as zero-rating, except at a more granular level.

The problem with this is twofold: First, it forces content on LinkedIn to take an extremely unnatural shape that doesn’t make sense for a social media platform, often extending well beyond what people want out of it, and two, it limits reach to anyone that doesn’t play by LinkedIn’s rules. It’s a free-trade issue, essentially, and LinkedIn is dominant enough in its niche of business content that a regulator should look into this.

In many ways, social media has these kinds of issues in spades—including on that site I still call Twitter, which has forced people to write gigantic threads instead of linking to blog posts, and Instagram, which is so dominant that it has allowed the creation of secondary businesses around the link in bio.

This is what social media has become, an attempt to work around algorithms, rather than a way to engage with people. As Anil Dash wrote back in 2019, with a focus on Instagram rather than LinkedIn, social media seems to be doing all it can to destroy the value of the link:

There are some legitimate reasons platforms limit links. Spammers abuse links. Trust is hard to verify around links—too many scammers make links that look real, but lead to sketchy sites. Building a system to monitor all the links being posted on a big platform does take some cost. Maybe you can have a link again, if you are already in the 1% most influential users on the platform and put it in a story—the part of Instagram's experience that drives the engagement metrics they care about. Maybe you just give up, and pay for links, by buying advertising.

But killing off links is a strategy. It may be presented as a cost-saving measure, or as a way of reducing the sharing of untrusted links. But it is a strategy, designed to keep people from the open web, the place where they can control how, and whether, someone makes money off of an audience. The web is where we can make sites that don’t abuse data in the ways that Facebook properties do.

If you’re committed to one ecosystem or another, you’re really committed. And LinkedIn wants committed users. But on the other hand, people don’t run their entire lives on LinkedIn. It’s not like Nike or Blackstone or your local cupcake shop or your local neighborhood content hustlers can just live on LinkedIn. But LinkedIn acts as if that’s what you need to do to get ahead, and it feels like something we should start talking about in earnest.

What is the value of the link? Why are there so many barricades between the audience you’ve built and the link you want to share? (Hint: They think it’s not really your audience.) And when should regulators step in to ensure that our social networks aren’t impeding commerce by impeding links?

I know Lina Khan is pretty busy these days, but it feels like a question she might be well-suited to help answer.