LinkedIn

LinkedIn runs two products in one shell that barely cooperate. The profile is a structured resume: discrete sections for experience, skills, and endorsements, each editable inline, optimized for being read by a recruiter or scanned by a hiring filter. The home feed is the opposite, an engagement machine that rewards broetry, one-line-per-paragraph posts engineered to trigger the see-more tap and harvest reactions. A row of reaction types, follow-instead-of-connect prompts, and a relentless notification surface push interaction over substance. The friction is intentional in places: connection requests, message gating, and who-viewed-your-profile teasers all lean on the platform's status anxiety. What works is the profile's information architecture; what grates is a feed that imports every dark pattern from consumer social into a context that asked for restraint.