Twitter, what if LinkedIn was its natural replacement?

LinkedIn, on the other hand, seems to be the last vestige of the centralized internet that characterized the 1910s. For those who grew up with Bebo, Myspace and Facebook, the way LinkedIn delivers text and images in one feed is comfortable and familiar. I still use messaging apps like everyone else. But while groups on WhatsApp and Signal require active engagement, LinkedIn still allows for doing passive scrolling.

While Facebook’s problem is the excessive number of subscribers that make the feed a mixed experience, the 250 million user base makes Twitter too niche a platform. Personally, I consider Twitter a social media in its own right, the place where I interact with the people I know mainly through work. The feeling is that an entire part of my life, the one outside work, was excluded from the app.

Single window

I started using LinkedIn regularly after I started working for Wired US, when I saw my colleagues using the site to share their articles. The platform boasts nearly 900 million users. So, in a ruthless search for readers, I followed their example. Then something strange happened. The users who interacted with my posts weren’t just people I knew from work. They were former classmates or college mates, people I’d known for decades. All of a sudden, I was faced with the prospect that a “professional network” stood succeeding where Twitter had always failed: merging my work life with my social life. LinkedIn was becoming something of a one-stop shop for social media.

This does not mean that all users of LinkedIn find the experience pleasant. Even the friends that I meet more often on the platform say they somehow feed the grudge in his regards. If on the one hand it is pleasant to see their friends’ updates on the site – they say – they are on LinkedIn above all for professional reasons: “Work encourages us to use it and I think it’s useful for getting your name out there”says Delia, who works in real estate in London.

LinkedIn wouldn’t tell me whether or not it’s seen a spike in users since Elon Musk took over Twitter. As a replacement for him, even LinkedIn might not be perfect. If Twitter’s main problem is that it’s run by the world’s richest man, perhaps it wouldn’t make sense to switch to a platform owned by Microsoft, a company founded by the world’s fifth richest man, Bill Gates. Cost is also an issue: “LinkedIn Premium membership is expensive”points out Corinne Podger, who runs training programs for journalists.

But at least within my group of friends, LinkedIn is finding new relevance, even if talking about it seems wrong, almost taboo. The fact that I find more active friends on LinkedIn than on any other platform demonstrates how fragmented the social media industry is. The site’s rise could spell the death of social media as it is today or the beginning of a new, unhealthy kind of online presence in which it is impossible to separate work from social life. But one thing’s for sure: While many of my friends use LinkedIn, I haven’t yet found one I’m proud of.

This content originally appeared on Wired UK.