Here is a quick tip on bringing back your sanity when using LinkedIn. Whether you are familiar with algorithmic timelines work or not, it has certainly come to your attention that your home feed page is not chronologically organized. Instead, you see posts from people and organizations that LinkedIn’s content-matching algorithms thought you might be interested in. Those are so good that you’d often catch yourself scrolling, and scrolling, and scrolling, often, forgetting why you were there in the first place. Not only that but even if you found something actually worth your attention, LinkedIn will likely rearrange your feed completely the next time you open the page.
This is a phenomenon called doomscrolling and is something that most social media applications make good use of. However, LinkedIn has turned that into perfection. The goal is no longer to deliver valuable updates from your professional contacts (which was its original purpose), but just to keep you engaged and coming back for more.
How to bring your sanity back #
LinkedIn’s settings menu is an area I intentionally avoid visiting because I never find anything there. No surprise there, either. I am pretty sure that an entire team of engineers and product people take responsibility for intentionally making it harder to tweak the defaults. But the bottom line is, that there is a setting that anyone can switch, which will cause one’s feed to return the old, chronologically sorted, untouched-by-algorithms, stream of updates.
This setting is called Preferred Feed View, and you can currently find it here. I am saying currently, because it used to be named differently, and resided in a different menu. For obvious reasons, these things tend to change their places, so at the time you are reading this blog post, it may not even exist anymore. If that is the case, please let me know, and I will update the content accordingly.
Once, you find this setting, all you need is to toggle the switch to “Most recent items,” and go back to enjoying LinkedIn updates without the algorithmically imposed slop.
Have something to say? Join the discussion below 👇
Want to explore instead? Fly with the time capsule 🛸
You may also find these interesting
Money Defeated Magic
They gave us a universal currency; we turned it into a casino. They gave us a town square; we turned it into a fight club. They gave us a universal oracle; we turned it into a billboard.
LinkedIn Is Not Having an Identity Crisis. Jobs Are.
It’s not just the platform that’s changed. It’s us.