From my observation, LinkedIn has had three relatively distinct eras for the product.
In the early days it was very simple work & business networking, as you'd expect it to be. A profile + connection between people.
Then it tried to evolve into a more general purpose tool, including publishing content, some communication, etc.
Then having fully captured its market, and with limited upside growth potential on users, it went full spam abuse engine. They kept ratcheting up the user monetization focus regardless of the damage to the product quality, and it has never turned back from that path.
I think LinkedIn is a social hole, where people deposit an account and information out of perceived necessity, and then rarely engage the product again until they change or update their job situation. There appears to be a shield of social-work pressure that keeps it alive and updating. People use it, so people use it. The value proposition certainly appears to be mediocre over time. I've known very, very few people that have gotten much value from it, yet almost everyone I know (that is non-retired) keeps and maintains a profile at a minimum level.
I suspect now that social media has reached a point in the last ~5 years of all-connected status (just speaking of the US here), it's going to become increasingly socially acceptable to quit platforms that were previously regarded as necessary. More and more people will experiment with rejecting the pressure that has been maintaining these networks artificially. I've seen that happen increasingly on Facebook, and LinkedIn often seems to be a graveyard these days.
I don't see where LinkedIn can go from here, in terms of increasing its value to people. They're very clearly not going to return the product to a less annoying, basic use case that sparked the user build-out in the first place. They may find a few more clever ways to monetize their hostages though.
This is a fantastic summary, and something I'm going to think about with non-LinkedIn contexts as well. At this point, I update LinkedIn so it won't be out of date, and keep it alive so I'm not confused with other people. (And because deleting the thing looks like more of a pain than having it...)
It's an entirely defensive posture, and I only go to LinkedIn to pour information in, rather than to take anything valuable out.
Actually, it makes me think of those stupid "communication for recipient only" email disclaimers. They probably don't carry any legal weight, but once they got common some companies worried that if they didn't use them it could be brought up in court as evidence that the communication was shareable - so now everyone adds 5-10 lines to their emails just to get back to where they were before the meme ever started.
GitHub is the only "social" platform I still have involvement with, and that's because it's actually useful. ;)
Why anyone else uses it I have no idea.
Serious question: does this actually work? I'm considering a "content strategy" to build brand trust, and one option is to publish on LinkedIn. I'm pretty new to using the ecosystem for anything meaningful though. I'm in the middle of my "free trial" of the +1 level (Pro? I forgot- whatever they try to get you to sign up for...).
But if published content actually gets read, or if at least people search there when trying to learn more about somebody, then I'll consider it.
I update my profile there occasionally, but only to not have out-of-date info being spread. It occasionally produces a low-quality contact or recruiter spam. That's about it. My peers don't keep theirs up to date, my employers don't use it as a major hiring source, I don't trust endorsements there as meaningful or predictive. The interface is enormously frustrating, and it's not even a particularly good job board.
Is there just a parallel ecosystem of people who engage with LinkedIn so deeply and consistently that it forms a real network? Is software just a low-LinkedIn-use field? What on earth are people doing on that site?