LinkedIn Killed the Facebook Star Today

6 min readNov 21, 2020

How Modern Life Has Annihilated the Distinction Between the Personal and Professional

I don’t own this image and this is a parody, Please don’t sue me.

I thought of the title for this piece before I knew what I wanted to say. The phrase popped into my head after I realized I search for people on LinkedIn before I check Facebook or Instagram. I’m not ashamed. After all, I haven’t updated my Facebook profile since I was in high school, and most everyone sets their Instagram to private. If you want up-to-date, accessible information about what someone looks like and what they do, LinkedIn is the safest bet. But that sparked a broader question: If Facebook and LinkedIn are interchangeable for me, what does that say about LinkedIn? What does it say about me?

LinkedIn looks exactly like Facebook. It doesn’t seem at all remarkable that people would interact with it the same way. The platforms’ functionality is virtually identical. Their feeds look the same. Their built-in IM systems look similar. Their “react” buttons convey a similar range of emotions — like, love, support, sadness. LinkedIn even cribbed Facebook’s blue and white color scheme.

But there even more differences! Facebook has focused on developing Groups into the premiere space on the site — areas where it still feels “safe” to make a text post. LinkedIn Groups, by contrast, were dead on arrival. Facebook has poured billions of dollars into their messaging applications like WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger, betting big on the importance of group chats in modern social life. No one has a LinkedIn group chat.

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More broadly speaking, LinkedIn’s context is virtually orthogonal to Facebook’s. It exists within a broader Microsoft ecosystem, designed to extract cold hard cash from professionals. Facebook is “free and always will be,” per their splash page. LinkedIn has various premium all-access plans (full disclosure: I’m a desperate, unemployed loser who has paid for Premium Business in the past). LinkedIn Learning, a freemium education service, is increasingly integrated into Microsoft’s software sales strategy. In short, the two platforms have pretty distinct target audiences and revenue streams.

But LinkedIn doesn’t feel like a resume platform or even a networking platform. It doesn’t even really feel like a social media network that has anything to do with jobs. Sure, some people use it that way. But the majority of my feed looks something like this:

Does this look that distinct? Like, at all? We can talk about the content and the intended audience, but the formatting and aesthetics are fundamentally the same. If two platforms are as distinct as they seem to be, why the convergence? Why do different people interact with Facebook and LinkedIn in almost precisely the same way?

As I was halfway through writing this article, LinkedIn did me a gigantic solid and rolled out an enormous update to their mobile app. Here’s a comparison with the Facebook app:

LinkedIn describes their app’s redesign as a pivot to a “new look that’s warmer and puts the community front and center.” LinkedIn’s VP of Design, Sarah Alpern, is explicit about this, nothing that LinkedIn is “no longer just a place to find a job” — something that they’ve strived to reflect in the app’s new design philosophy. LinkedIn is focused on “infusing community” and creating an experience designed to “share and inspire.” All of this is a far cry from LinkedIn’s origins. LinkedIn isn’t just a virtual CV, it isn’t just a job site, and it isn’t just a hub for training. Alpern is pretty explicitly saying that she wants people to use LinkedIn for their whole lives, not only their professional needs.

LinkedIn Killed the Facebook Star Today

How Modern Life Has Annihilated the Distinction Between the Personal and Professional

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