Cringe is Content

What I actually know about the LinkedIn algorithm in 2026.

People keep asking how I grew on LinkedIn, so here’s the whole answer in one place. The honest start is that I’m not all that popular. My LinkedIn Learning courses are strong and that’s good news for my bank account, but I’m not a creator with a quarter million followers. What I have is the long view. I’m member 571,851, which means I joined in May 2004, when the network was still racing toward its first million, and I’ve watched it change from a quiet professional directory into the algorithmic feed you scroll now.

My history matters to you because you weren’t there. You’re arriving late, into a crowded platform where the rules are already set, and most of the advice floating around was written for a friendlier, pre-AI version of it. So this is for three people: the one building a personal brand before a layoff forces it, the job seeker who wants work faster, and the marketer who wants to keep the job and quit running tactics that died two years ago.

The thing you have to understand is that LinkedIn is having an identity crisis, and everything in your feed is the outcome. The platform needs engagement, which rewards fast, personal, cringe content. It needs big numbers for advertisers, which rewards more of the same. And it needs to keep calling itself a serious professional network to attract those B2B advertisers, which is the boring part that undercuts the first two. No other platform is wired this deeply into work, so no other platform is stuck in this trap. When Meta tried to build a work product, it flopped. LinkedIn will never become Slack, because LinkedIn is also where you go to find your next job.

You can see the crisis in the feed itself. It’s one narrow landing page and a flood of photos, carousels, text posts, articles, newsletters, ads, and political rants in the same scroll. Facebook looks like a hot mess too, but Meta at least gave people filtering tools, kept investing in Groups, and built separate experiences on Threads, WhatsApp, and Instagram so you could step away from the slop — and get a different variation of slop — without leaving its universe.

LinkedIn did none of that, and being a professional user with a recruiting or sales license doesn’t save you from the volume.

So what’s happening on LinkedIn right now? Here are my thoughts.

Cringe is content

You can’t fight city hall. People are pulled toward personal, awkward, inflammatory content, and they pick it over useful insight almost every time. I watch this in my own testing, and I’ve pulled down posts that went viral too fast because the comments were more than I wanted to manage.

Meanwhile my Learning courses, which are good and which make LinkedIn money every time someone watches, get very little algorithmic push at all because someone with a news background in an editorial division, which still exists if you can believe it, wants the algorithm to be fair and impartial. As if that’s even possible.

My own most recent example was personal. When I wrote about my husband Ken retiring, no angle, just the moment, it traveled widely the way personal posts do. You can see the post here.

But when I push out my LinkedIn Learning courses, I get 843 views. Not likes. Total views.

So the algorithm is actually reinforcing me to push non-business and non-money-making content out there.

The algorithm punishes anyone making money but LinkedIn

Here’s the rule nobody states plainly: The algorithm is sensitive to anyone making money except LinkedIn, Microsoft, GitHub, and the advertisers who pay directly. On LinkedIn you’re competing with an algorithm built to return value to Microsoft shareholders, and it isn’t on your side when you’re the one trying to get paid.

Self-promotion gets throttled, and the algorithm is wired so that even self-promotion of a LinkedIn product becomes suspect. (Make it make sense!) Hiding your link in the comments fools no one, so put it wherever you want. But do the self-promotion too often, and even your friendly cringe content gets shadow banned.

Good-looking people win, and you’re the reason

A friend used to joke that being LinkedIn Famous was a consolation prize for smart, ugly people. I don’t think that’s true anymore. There’s a new equation: looking good buys reach, and looking good while saying something worth hearing buys more.

Nobody on the business side decided to create a site where hot people do well. The algorithm gives you more of what grabs your attention. So when you stop for the beach photo and the dressed-up headshot, it reads that as a signal. You built the beauty bias with your own thumb.

That’s why you see the tech bro with gym photos and the AI expert in a gorgeous outfit sipping lemonade in Italy. Don’t like it? Don’t lie to me. I see your work-related updates when you’re dressed up in conference attire and your thoughts about tariffs posted right after you get fresh blonde highlights.

It’s worth considering if you are the kind of person who would post that same photo while doing yard work, after watching your kid’s little league game in the hot sun, or in the moments after scrubbing out litter boxes and rinsing them in your driveway.

We created this monster, and we are beholden to it until someone goes first and starts doing things differently.

So why am I telling you to feed the LinkedIn beast?

I’ve spent this whole piece calling LinkedIn an extractive machine that rewards cringe, throttles the people trying to earn a living, and runs on a beauty bias you helped build. And now I’m about to hand you a plan to feed it five days a week. All of those things can be true at once.

If you’re in, the formula is simple. Post one personal or cringe post for every three professional ones. Write about your industry, react to the news, publish your newsletter, then show us the cute dog or tell us something true with no lesson attached.

Skip hashtags. Skip video for now, because all indications are that your direct-to-camera updates on LinkedIn are under-performing text posts. Stop hiding your links in comments. Hold yourself to one post a day, and when it goes up, answer every comment in the first hour and come back twice more that day.

None of that advice is new, and plenty of people have said it. What they leave out is the cost. Done right, this is a part-time job, five posts a week that are babysat three times a day. It’s real labor on top of the work you already do. If you can’t commit to the cadence, don’t start.

Give it a month and you’ll see engagement, growth, and new followers finding you for the first time. What you won’t see is money, unless this connects to an actual business strategy, and that takes more than following the advice on a free post like this one. It takes marketing professionals and a real investment in your business.

If you want a referral to people who can make a difference, hit me up. I’ve got good ones in my network.

The Punk Rock HR Podcast

Tameka Vasquez grew up in tech, absorbed the ethos of moving fast and breaking things, and assumed that was just how work operated. It took years of consulting outside the industry, with leaders in finance, real estate, and manufacturing, to show her how rare that tolerance actually was. Most leaders, she found, can handle “change” they have already seen. Everything else beyond that lands as a threat.

That gap is what her practice is built around. Tameka is a strategist and speaker whose SHIFT™ framework approaches the future as a verb: something leaders actively do rather than a destination they are trying to reach. The through line across all five elements is the same. You cannot lead into unknown territory if your entire toolkit is designed for familiar ground.

Listen here!