Scroll through LinkedIn for ten minutes. You’ll notice something.
The sameness.
A selfie, usually.
Then a few lines in staccato rhythm.
Short sentences.
Each on its own line.
Even when the thought doesn’t need it.
It looks like a manifesto. But it’s just formatting theatre.
I was just trying the template. Made me cringe 🙂
The dramatic “hook” about quitting a job or failing bravely. Then the inevitable question at the bottom: “What do you think?”. Or a specific ask for a specific phrase to be added in the comment so that something can be sent via DM.
And if one person’s “My kid did/said this, and this is what I learnt…” post seemed popular, you can find hundreds more like that, with or without actual kids, babies, Uber drivers, house helps saying or doing things that lead to a ‘LinkedIn lesson’. With a selfie featuring the kid/baby, mostly.
Or you may have seen this too – one person writes about how his parents led simple lives, invested in fixed deposits. It gathers a lot of Likes. And then it also gathers copycats – more people talk about the simple life of their parents, their interest to store old plastic covers, investing in fixed deposits and so on.
Many such posts end up in a really funny Reddit/Twitter compilation called ‘LinkedIn Lunatics’. For a reason.
Different faces, different companies, same content skeleton. This is the “LinkedIn algorithm hack” in action. And it’s killing more personal brands than it’s helping.
Why? For that, let me take you first into the ocean, with sharks!
When Jaws made everyone see dollar signs
Back in 1975, Steven Spielberg released Jaws. You already know the story: the shark, the beach town, the music that makes you hear danger even when nothing is on screen.
What’s interesting is what happened after.
Hollywood saw that a formula was ready to be cracked: giant shark, suspense, terror in the water. And soon, Hollywood was flooded with shark movies. Orca. Great White. Deep Blue Sea. Sharknado. IMDb lists over 180 shark films in total!
Most of them were terrible.
But they got made because the formula worked once. Studios thought: “Why risk originality when we can repeat what the market clearly likes?”
That’s the same logic people now apply to LinkedIn posts. Something works, so people copy it. And then another copy. And another. Until the whole feed looks like the cinematic wasteland of shark knock-offs.
The LinkedIn hack playbook
Here’s the current recipe people swear by:
The manifesto format. Every post written like a declaration, broken into 2–3 word sentences, one below the other. Even when the content doesn’t need it. It looks dramatic, but mostly just looks like everyone else’s feed.
A selfie, because faces grab attention. Even when that selfie has no context whatsoever to that post… your selfie/photo is already in your display picture, remember… if people didn’t know how you look!
A hooky first line, because you need people to click “see more”.
These are all attempts to “play the algorithm”.
Ironically, LinkedIn or its employees have never ever advocated using one or more hacks that are in vogue now, or ever. It’s always someone else assuming what works, anecdotally.
Do they work? Sometimes (more on how it “works”, below).
Do they build your brand? Almost never.
Because your brand isn’t the number of likes you collect. Your brand is your distinctiveness. And nothing kills distinctiveness faster than looking, sounding, and posting like everyone else.
Enter Netflix: The Atlas problem
Now, let’s leave LinkedIn and the sharks, and head to Netflix. Because this is where the parallel really hits.
Netflix has mountains of data. They know what you click, how long you watch, when you stop, even which thumbnail makes you press play. They crunch all of it to predict what you’ll binge.
That sounds smart. But here’s what it looks like in practice.
Take Atlas, a sci-fi film. Screenwriter Aron Coleite originally opened the film with a wild scene: Jennifer Lopez interrogating the severed head of a robot terrorist! It was strange, and hence memorable. But also “risky”.
But Netflix said no.
Their data told them viewers need a “hook” immediately, and that the window for attention is shrinking. So the severed-head scene was scrapped. In came a safe, conventional SWAT-team raid.
Coleite admitted he was swayed by the numbers: “I see [the window] shrinking as attention spans are harder to corral.”
And just like that, a distinctive opening became a generic one. Not because of creative vision, but because the algorithm wanted safety.
When the algorithm becomes the director
Netflix isn’t shy about this. Filmmakers quoted in the Guardian article described getting notes like: “Have this character announce what they’re doing so that viewers who are on their phone can still follow along”!
Think about that. Scenes rewritten not for story, but for distracted scrolling.
It’s the cinematic equivalent of “add a selfie” on LinkedIn. Or the equivalent of the manifesto style formatting. Engineered for quick engagement, not putting the thought first.
The riskier choice — the robot head, the ambiguous moment, the quiet pause — gets tossed aside. Because it doesn’t test well in the data.
LinkedIn feeds = Netflix catalogs
Do you see the parallel?
On LinkedIn:
A manifesto-style format is your forced exposition.
A selfie is your SWAT-team raid.
The hooky “You won’t believe what happened” line is your algorithm magnet.
The endless “What do you think?” is your closing instruction.
It’s all engineered for visibility. And it works, in the shallow sense.
But just like Netflix’s endless catalog of safe, bland algorithm movies (sometimes called “mockbusters”), LinkedIn feeds fill up with clones. Distinctiveness gets sanded down. Few remember who said what.
The other side of Netflix — and the illusion of “hits”
To be fair, Netflix isn’t just a graveyard of algorithm clones. When it dares to think away from the herd, it has produced some of the most successful programming of the past decade. Think Stranger Things, The Crown, Squid Game, and KPop Demon Hunters. These worked not because they were safe, but because they carried bold, distinctive creative visions.
KPop Demon Hunters, in particular, is a remarkable case. It’s made by Americans (produced by Sony) who have beautifully imbibed what makes ‘K’ content tick, and now even the Koreans love it. Not very different from ‘Avatar – The Last Air Bender’ series earlier that many people assume was written by Asians and was based on some anime series. It wasn’t. It was written by an American duo!
But here’s the catch. Even Netflix’s “hits” are often proclaimed as such because of how Netflix itself defines a “view.” Once upon a time, a “view” meant you’d watched at least 70% of a film. Later it became two minutes!
The goalposts keep moving, and suddenly almost anything can be called a “hit.”
LinkedIn’s algorithm does something similar. When you post something that panders to the algorithm—the manifesto, the selfie, the bait question—the algorithm “shows” it to people, of course. You get impressions, maybe a burst of likes.
But just as with Netflix’s view counts, that doesn’t mean people truly engaged with you, or that your reputation grew.
Visibility is not the same as credibility. Reach is not the same as brand.
And that’s the trap.
It’s also a cycle. You read about what ‘works’ on LinkedIn. You try it yourself. The algorithm liked it and showed it to people. People saw it. You liked that people saw it and your ‘impressions’ zoomed. So, you want to repeat the same process by doing more of what ‘worked’.
The cost of pandering
When you let the algorithm dictate your output, you confuse attention with identity.
Yes, you might get more impressions. Yes, a post or two might “go viral”. But what happens after? Do people remember you? Do people associate you with something specifically? Or just the formula you used?
Your brand may not grow stronger. It just gets noisier.
That’s why many people on LinkedIn end up frustrated. They chase metrics, they get some reach, but when they step back, they realize: “All this posting, and my brand doesn’t feel any clearer.”
It’s the same reason most shark movies after ‘Jaws’ are forgotten. Same reason ‘Atlas’ will never be remembered like the bold films Netflix could have made instead.
To be sure, if you think of yourself as a “content creator” or as an “influencer”, you are perfectly right in chasing impressions and pandering to an “audience”, based on what “works” in terms of the metrics that LinkedIn offers you. It’s just that the purpose of personal branding is very, very different.
The alternative: Resonance over replication
So what’s the way out?
Track the right signals. Comments are nice. But DMs, invitations, speaking gigs, client calls — that’s the personal brand impact.
Even better? Take the stithapragya approach: The stithapragya framework for personal branding.
Don’t trade the robot head for a SWAT raid.
Your brand is the severed robot head.
Distinctive. Risky. Memorable.
When you follow the hack playbook, you swap it for a generic SWAT raid.
Familiar. Forgettable.
Just like Netflix. Just like the shark movie glut after Jaws. Just like every cloned post on your LinkedIn feed right now.
Algorithms will always push you toward the middle. Toward what’s safe, what’s repeatable, what “works”. But your brand lives in the edges.
So the next time you’re about to post, ask yourself: am I writing what I really want to say, or am I just giving the algorithm another SWAT-team raid?
Because nobody builds a brand on clones.
PS: The larger problem is why people are chasing the LinkedIn algorithm and cloning others’ so-called successful posts. That happens because they have not spent enough time defining their personal brand sharply and creating content pipelines for themselves. This is a separate topic, and worth a detailed post in itself!