Kristen Strmel Blog Post #10: Is Getting Your "Cringe Content" Reposted on Reddit Good, Actually? Tales from /r/LinkedInLunatics
Boy, oh boy. I can't even describe how long I've been waiting to talk about this one.
So, LinkedIn. It's a great place to network, showcase your career accomplishments, and foster healthy professional connections, right? That's what it's supposed to be for, anyway. There's a certain subset of LinkedIn users who have taken things to the next level, however. For these users, the mundanities of personal life become profound business lessons that absolutely must be posted immediately. Something like dealing with a bad Uber ride becomes a reflection on the importance of speaking up and having courage (which is a fair lesson, but not exactly something you'd expect is relevant on LinkedIn). It is apparently also a place to discuss how your decision to open a notebook for brainstorming instead of staring at a screen totally, 100% led to a "major media executive" handing you his business card. And for some of these users, LinkedIn presents opportunities not just for career and professional development, but for....finding your future spouse...?
This subsection of LinkedIn users, for which the site is something like the didact's Facebook, is colloquially known as "LinkedIn Lunatics"--and as you may have noticed from my links, there's an entire subreddit of the same name dedicated to gathering these posts together for communal ridicule. It's quite active, with thousands of users coming together daily to mock posts that they label "cringe content": aka, vapid attempts at teaching life lessons, whether it be through fabricating stories and people or typing a prompt into ChatGPT (oftentimes both). I've seen some pretty hilarious comments parodying these posts, such as "I spilled my coffee running onto the train this morning. Here's what it taught me about B2B (business-to-business) sales." You could say that the community thrives upon opposition to this bemusing, wide-as-an-ocean-but-deep-as-a-puddle-type brand promotion philosophy. But as with all things social media related, there's always the risk that things might go too far.
Many of these "lunatics" are aware of the subreddit's existence--(NOTE: this link includes some expletives) this user recounts how posting a picture of a toenail he'd broken while running in an attempt to overcompensate for not meeting some of his goals landed him right on its front page. And sure, posting a picture of your broken toenail to demonstrate goal "overindexing", as he terms it, might be a bit much, but the "joking" didn't stop there--instead, it turned into straight-up insults regarding his weight, hygiene, and Palestinian heritage. He does try to put a positive spin on things, though, noting that the reposting did earn his profile a ton of new views and the chance to see how he might be viewed through the lens of context collapse.
Now, I think it's pretty safe to say that using someone's post, regardless of how ridiculous you might find it, as a springboard to insult them in this way is utterly unacceptable. Yet an odd parallelism seems to exist between these two communities--a symbiotic relationship, if you will. The so-called "lunatics" of LinkedIn have turned to incorporating decidedly unconventional means of brand promotion to earn prestige and validity in their digital networks. The denizens of /r/LinkedInLunatics feed off of this unique brand promotion to sustain their own community, creating threads upon threads of snide and incredulous reactions to this "cringe content." And sometimes, having this "cringe" reposted on the subreddit benefits "lunatics" through wider profile exposure. This prompts them to keep posting, giving the subreddit's members endless hours of content to laugh at.
That aside, I do think there's something to be said about accountability here. /r/LinkedInLunatics' front page contains this note claiming that users don't need to censor usernames in posts they submit because LinkedIn posts are public anyway:
I'm personally not sure how to feel about this. Sure, LinkedIn users do have agency over whether or not to post what they do, and knowledge of their existence leads to wider exposure. At the same time, /r/LinkedInLunatics certainly doesn't exist to promote them positively. What do you all think? Is the public nature of LinkedIn posts a solid reason for /r/LinkedInLunatics' policy, or should it hold itself to higher accountability standards? And do you think that the relationship between these two communities is truly symbiotic?
Hi Kristen, thanks for another interesting and bizarre post! I'd never heard of LinkedIn Lunatics until today, and I'm still wrapping my head around why they are choosing to post on that platform of all places. From everything you've said, I feel that these people are not inherently doing something wrong, but they should be doing it on another platform. Reddit exists and it would be the ideal place for their posts- Reddit embraces chaos, personal experience, and cringe content. In fact, it's what fuels the whole site. Between "Am I the A-Hole", "Are we dating the same guy?", and countless other storytime-type threads, the LinkedIn Lunatics could get all their needs fulfilled, whether they want to use it as a dating site, sharing injury posts, or telling anecdotes about spilled coffee. I think some of these people, especially the latter group would also have a field day on Substack, another platform where people can write blog posts. A story about what coffee taught you about your job would garner positive attention there. I think their man issue is that they're on the wrong platform so their content sticks out and reads as weird. If they posted on a site that was a better fit, I don't think they'd be lunatics; it's just that LinkedIn is known for networking and professionalism so it seems jarring and out of place.
ReplyDeleteIt's true that some of these anecdotes wouldn't seem so out of place if they were posted on another platform. (I've actually only vaguely heard of Substack before reading your reply--thanks for introducing it here!) I suspect that these "lunatics" see LinkedIn as the ideal platform to post their anecdotes because they believe that these anecdotes are themselves a form of networking. It's developed an odd subculture where using mundane (and possibly falsified) life stories to humblebrag about ostensive business/marketing achievements is somehow acceptable. I imagine that these posters fear that another platform wouldn't give them as much reach, hence their decision to continue using LinkedIn. That does beg the question of why they simply wouldn't use it as intended instead of trying to relate personal anecdotes to professional life...though I suspect it's because some of them may be trying to blow up their achievements through the guise of professionalism. If they were actually as successful as they claim, couldn't they post about tangible achievements instead of how spilling their coffee taught them about the value of expecting the unexpected? To be clear, I'm not trying to diminish the hard work that start-up businesses require, especially if they're trying to reach a wider audience through professional networking; it's just odd that they choose these specific methods of storytelling.
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