Straitlaced LinkedIn is a pyramid scheme
- Claire Baker
- Dec 25, 2025
- 2 min read
Straitlaced LinkedIn is a pyramid scheme.
Think about it.
The levels go like this:
LinkedInexperienced
The casual job seeker
You join LinkedIn like you go to a Tupperware party. It doesn’t seem like fun, but it’s what you do when you need a job.
It’s as lame as you expected, but you politely smile and make small talk with your friend’s coworker’s former manager’s personal website designer.
Most never come back, but some see the possibility of career advancement and become...
LinkediNovices
The marks
The next level are the LinkediNovices. They're the empty calories that the Mighty Algorithm feeds on. They post about thinking holistically, cross-functional alignment, and what moves the needle — probably written by AI*.
No one reads it... that’s not the point.
They're there because AFTER they post their whatever, they engage with other people’s stuff, deepening the engagement channels for those higher up the pyramid. Until they're hooked and become...
* Deliberate, ironic em-dash use.
LinkedInsatiables
The algo slaves
They randomly hit on a few winners and start to grasp what makes the Mighty Algorithm happy. Not bland, wordy business content, but gossip, trolling, and goofing off.
They forget they came here for work and start shoveling content into void daily, desperately hoping to go viral. Their voices drown each other out.
So they spend hours collecting vast networks of strangers they don’t care about, just to build their reach and hopefully graduate to...
LinkedInfluencers
The prophets
Near the pointy end of the pyramid are the ones who broke out. The LinkedInfluencers. They have an entourage to make sure every post gets instant engagement. The entourage may be on their payroll or just a random group of parasocial sycophants.
They get more engagement on a single slow post than the LinkedInsatiables get in a week.
Since their posts dominate the feeds of those on the lower levels, the plebeians believe that with enough work, someday hundreds of strangers will care about THEIR company happy hour, too. But the LinkedInfluencers are just fluff between who LinkedIn is really for...
In-Luminati
At the very top of the pyramid are the household names. They don’t post often, but their posts become press-releases, pumped directly to the nightly news.
Their words reverberate down the pyramid with enough force to remind us that there are heights we will never reach, no matter how hard we work.
Lizard People
And above them are the people who are so important that they aren’t even on LinkedIn. They are the sky the pyramid reaches for. The people so untouchable that they are beyond connection.
Business leaders with more users than the populations of nations. With market caps the size of GDPs. With private estates like palaces. You can’t search for them, they find you.
👋 I’m Claire. I’m at LinkedInsatiable. I connect with people who don’t have “branding” or “marketing” in their headlines.
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