Work can be pretty hard to come by these days, so the idea of a networking platform that lets you connect with others in your industry and puts your profile in front of recruiters is hardly something to sneer at. But LinkedIn has come a long way since its early days as a straightforward professional networking site, and many of us have resigned ourselves to the fact that it’s no longer just a place to make connections or look for jobs.

It’s also gained a reputation as a hotbed of humblebrags, tone-deaf takes, and posts that read like they were written by people who’ve never touched grass. Fortunately, others online are documenting the platform’s most unhinged moments. From wildly out-of-touch musings to bizarre corporate “bro-etry” written as though the author has unlocked some profound secret to success, these examples show just how cringeworthy LinkedIn can get.

#1 Hired And Fired On The Same Day. Can’t Be More Lunatic Than This

#2 Youth Loneliness Is Cured By Adults Going Into The Office

#3 Engagement Just Pips It And Makes It Through To The Next Round

LinkedIn launched in 2003, offering professionals a place to share their résumés, look for jobs, and connect with people in their industry. As Medium blogger Usman describes it, the platform was essentially “a digital resume with a social layer—useful, maybe a little boring, but functional.” And for a while, that’s exactly how people used it.

#4 Someone Failed Physics

#5 If You Don't Get Married At Work You Aren't A Team Player

#6 He Definitely Did Had A Great Co-Working Day

In a 2015 blog post, one LinkedIn user, Henry Innis, looked back on those early days fondly: “LinkedIn started well. It became my rolodex into a range of professional contacts and I could keep [in] touch with the people I had met. Updates around job titles and similar were pretty handy, and it was a little like listing my resume online.”

#7 This Is Really Quite Sad

#8 Please Leave By 9pm

#9 Prove Him Wrong

But by the time Innis wrote that, he felt things were already changing. In his view, users had begun treating the platform as a place to share whatever was on their minds. “There’s no filter,” he wrote. LinkedIn, he said, had “in effect, become a bit of a cesspool of bad, naff updates. It feels like the dorky, sanitised version of Facebook (if there was such a thing).”

#10 Retired? You're Non-Existant To Kathy

#11 Sleep Is Overrated. Be Successful Instead!

#12 Wth

If LinkedIn was already getting dorky in 2015, things were about to get a whole lot weirder. Usman notes how, in the following years, LinkedIn “took a hard left turn straight into weird territory.” As he puts it, people started treating it like “Facebook for suits,” and feeds filled up with emotional confessions and diary-style posts dressed up as leadership lessons. He jokingly says, “You’d see posts like, ‘I failed my first interview, then I failed five more. But on the sixth, I got hired to refill the vending machine.’”

#13 Absolutely Tone Deaf

I've been following this person for a while on LinkedIn. She's a workaholic lunatic who who pushes her desire to work all the time on to her following. We should not be pushing a culture that drives us to work all the time, especially while we're in the hospital recovering from an emergency or on vacation with our families. This just drove me insane.

#14 God Forbid A Candidate Asks The Questions That Matter

#15 I Was Waiting For This One

As usual bro missing the point - it’s about how much is ethical to spend and the message it sends to society. pure selfishness. feed poor people instead.

Then came the pandemic. With home and work lives suddenly overlapping, people increasingly shared personal struggles on LinkedIn, from homeschooling to working at the kitchen table. Julien Wettstein, LinkedIn’s head of editorial for EMEA, told Refinery29 that the pandemic was “arguably the catalyst” for a major shift in how people presented themselves on the platform.

#16 Thanks For Sharing

#17 This Is Crazy

#18 You’re Not Busy, You’re Just Lazy!

LinkedIn leaned in. In 2021, it launched Creator Mode, a free setting designed to help users build an audience around their content. It replaced the “Connect” button with “Follow,” highlighted users’ original content, and made them easier to discover.

#19 Taking New Clients!

#20 So Cringe

#21 Thoughts?

That same year, LinkedIn announced a $25 million investment in creators, including a Creator Accelerator Program. In other words, LinkedIn wasn’t just adapting to the shift from digital résumé to personal brand. It was actively encouraging it.

#22 Good Morning People

#23 Stud

#24 Disney Trip

But the thing is, LinkedIn isn’t Instagram or TikTok. Every story, opinion, or milestone shared there is seen by colleagues, recruiters, managers, clients, and potential employers. As Refinery29’s Sadhbh O’Sullivan puts it, “LinkedIn You is the work version of yourself: polite, organized, a clear communicator, only makes jokes when appropriate, and can stare confidently down the barrel of a camera in a formal headshot. Instagram You, to a certain extent, can be hungover. BeReal You absolutely can. LinkedIn You most definitely cannot.”

#25 Yeah Sure This Happened Fr!

#26 Terminations On The 4th

#27 53 🤝 17 = Inspiring?

So what happens when a platform encourages people to share personal stories, but they still have to be “LinkedIn You”? For some, personal moments get filtered through a professional lens. The grocery run becomes a leadership lesson, the toddler’s tantrum turns into a masterclass in stakeholder management, and a minor Slack exchange becomes a career-defining epiphany. As Usman jokes, LinkedIn is the only place where someone can say “won my first match of Fortnite” and get 20,000 likes, as long as it’s framed as a story about perseverance.

#28 Not Sure If The Picture Is Legit But Yeah…….. No Thanks To That “Work Culture”

#29 This Is Just Sad

#30 Lunatic Thinks You Can Just Work From Any Office

For O’Sullivan, this gets at what she calls the “cringe crux.” On Instagram, Twitter, and TikTok, people started out simply being themselves, and the selling came later, once advertisers caught on. LinkedIn worked the other way around. Its users were marketing themselves from day one, since a résumé is essentially an ad for why you deserve to be hired. The personal storytelling came afterward. So on LinkedIn, a personal story can end up feeling less like an experience shared for its own sake and more like a sales pitch, usually for the person telling it.

And when that intention feels too obvious, the cringe follows.