That's all from me

I’ve been posting on LinkedIn for a coupld of months writing about various topics including, burnout in IT, data ownership, the slow drift of the internet away from something that felt worth building on. Topics I care about, written for an audience I respect.

But I’ve been honest with myself lately about what LinkedIn actually is, and whether it’s the right place for this kind of writing.

It isn’t, really.

Not because the people here aren’t worth talking to, they are. But LinkedIn has a particular gravity to it. I prefers highly sanitised contents and has a particular tone it rewards, and a format it favours. It is clear that there is also a kind of performance it quietly encourages such as the carefully considered hot take. As a result it is the professional optimism that keeps the engagement numbers healthy.

I’ve never been very good at that, and I’m not sure I want to get better at it.

A lot of what I’ve written about here like the dead internet, platforms that optimise for their own interests rather than yours, tools that nudge you toward someone else’s agenda, describes LinkedIn as accurately as anything else. It’s a walled garden with an algorithm, and the algorithm has opinions about what does well. Writing that’s honest and a bit uncomfortable and doesn’t resolve neatly into a lesson tends not to be it.

I’m not going to write a post about leaving LinkedIn and then reactivate my account three weeks later because I got anxious about visibility. I’ve done that already, actually and it didn’t help.

What I’m doing instead is simpler. I’m going to write on my own site, in my own space, on my own terms. No algorithm deciding who sees it. No feed to compete with. No nudge toward a format that performs better than the one I actually want to use.

If you’ve found the writing here useful, the blog is where it’ll be from now on. RSS still works. Email still works. The internet hasn’t completely forgotten how to let people follow things they’re interested in without a platform intermediating.

Thanks for reading. It’s been genuinely worthwhile, even if the platform wasn’t always.

See you on the other side.