When LinkedIn became Tinder in a suit

Posted on: 25 January 2026

I conducted an experiment. I changed my profile photograph to something marginally more polished. Nothing dramatic: better lighting, a less cluttered background.

Within forty-eight hours, my inbox had transformed into something rather more reminiscent of Hinge than a professional networking platform. Messages opening with compliments on the photograph. Connection requests adorned with emojis I hadn't encountered since the MSN Messenger era. Invitations to "virtual coffees" from individuals whose interest in my professional endeavours seemed, shall we say, tangential.

Anyone with a LinkedIn profile can confirm: the platform has undergone a genetic mutation. And it wasn't gradual. Something occurred over the past two or three years that transformed what was supposed to be the venue for professional networking into territory where the rules of engagement have become, to use a charitable term, fluid.

Commercial stalking was once tolerable. Someone following you for three weeks before pitching enterprise software or a personal development course was simply part of the folklore of digital networking. Tiresome, but understandable. Everyone has something to sell, and LinkedIn was the designated marketplace. One accepted connection requests knowing the pitch would eventually arrive. It was an implicit social contract: I grant you access to my network, you attempt to sell me something, I decline politely, we all carry on.

But there is a distinction between the persistent salesperson and the person staring at you across the bar. Or indeed, staring at you rather too intently.

Let us call her Jane Doe, to protect the privacy of someone who evidently has little regard for the concept. Jane Doe contacted me last week with a proposition that describing as "professional" would require considerable linguistic creativity. No preamble about synergies between our professional profiles. No pretence of "I've seen your work and would be keen to explore further." A proposition for an intimate encounter. Explicit. On LinkedIn. Between a recruiter's message and a notification about B2B market trends.

Now, I can take a joke. I've seen enough of the world to know that humanity comes in varieties, and that the internet amplifies every variation. I responded with the irony the situation warranted, and Jane Doe retreated to whatever depths she had emerged from. Case closed, anecdote for dinner parties.

But I found myself wondering: what if that message had reached someone else? Someone without the resources to handle such an approach? A professional at the start of their career using LinkedIn for its intended purpose? Someone with a history of harassment for whom that message would have been rather more than awkward?

There is another element that renders the whole affair more surreal still, and it concerns precisely those profile photographs that seem to trigger certain primitive instincts.

We are in the era of generative artificial intelligence. Instagram filters, which had already accustomed us to optimised versions of reality, have become prehistoric. Today, tools exist that can transform any snapshot into a magazine cover, smooth every imperfection, add ten years of gymnasium attendance never actually undertaken, create quite literally an alternative version of oneself bearing at most a vague resemblance to the original.

Which raises a philosophical question of some substance: when someone reacts to your profile photograph with Jane Doe's enthusiasm, to what precisely are they reacting? To you, or to a digital representation that may have been generated, retouched, or entirely reinvented by an algorithm?

Ironically, even had I accepted Jane Doe's proposition, there is no guarantee expectations would have been met. On either side. If my photograph can be artificially enhanced, so too can Jane Doe's. We might have found ourselves staring at each other with identical expressions of perplexity: "But you looked rather different in the photograph." "As did you." It would be a scene from a comedy of errors, were anyone laughing.

This is the final paradox of platforms that reward image: the image becomes progressively detached from reality, but the behaviours the image generates are entirely real. Jane Doe reacted to pixels, projected her fantasies onto those pixels, and acted upon those fantasies with the nonchalance of someone ordering a takeaway. That those pixels might represent something entirely different from reality apparently did not occur to her.

But let us return to the structural mechanism, because nothing that occurs on digital platforms is accidental. Everything responds to precise incentives that the system's architecture creates and reinforces.

LinkedIn must compete for attention with platforms engineered to stimulate the limbic system, and professional attention is scarce: no one opens LinkedIn ten times daily to see what colleagues are doing. Usage frequency is low, dwell time limited, engagement tepid. For a platform dependent on advertising and premium subscriptions, these are concerning figures.

Therefore the algorithm must manufacture artificial urgency. And the most effective urgency, the kind that bypasses the prefrontal cortex and proceeds directly to the limbic system, is relational. I devoted considerable pages to this mechanism in my recent book, "Prisoner of Yourself": "who viewed your profile" is functionally identical to "someone matched with you." The push notification replicates the response anxiety of Tinder. The feed rewards emotional content, personal stories, exposed vulnerabilities, because these generate visceral reactions that purely professional content cannot produce.

The platform imported the mechanics of dating apps because those mechanics work. They keep users engaged. They generate the compulsive engagement that serves quarterly figures well.

The problem is that along with the mechanics, it imported the behaviours.

Those who practise professional catcalling are not, in most cases, conscious predators. They are responding rationally to the platform's incentives. LinkedIn rewards visibility; visibility requires engagement; the easiest engagement is that which speaks to the gut rather than the head. The personalised message, even when "personalised" means inappropriate, achieves higher response rates than the generic message. Emotional content is amplified over informational content. The direct approach is rewarded over the gradual construction of a professional relationship.

The commercial pitch masquerading as personal interest is the suited version of the wolf whistle from a building site. And Jane Doe's intimate proposition is simply the logical extension of a tendency the platform itself has cultivated with patience and algorithmic dedication.

The paradox is almost poetic. A platform created to connect professionals has transformed into an environment where the boundary between networking and inappropriate advances has become blurred. Where "expanding one's network" and "making advances" employ the same tools and the same language. Where a connection request can mean anything from genuine interest in collaboration to the digital equivalent of harassment.

The content dominating the feed tells the same story. The "vulnerability marketing" that proliferates, the narration of personal difficulties deployed as an engagement tool, photographs increasingly curated and decreasingly professional: all of this has shifted the platform's register toward something resembling a generalist social network with romantic pretensions rather than a business tool.

I have seen posts that would be perfectly at home on Facebook, confessions belonging in a personal diary, emotional storytelling serving to construct an attractive image rather than a professional reputation. The platform does not penalise this content; it amplifies it. Because it generates comments, reactions, time spent on the page.

And when the environment communicates that professional rules are suspended, that the emotional is rewarded over the rational, that the direct approach works better than the mediated one, some users take this logic to its extreme conclusions.

The solution is not to moralise about those who employ these methods. That would be like blaming mice for the presence of cheese. Structure produces behaviour, not vice versa. As long as the platform rewards invasiveness, invasiveness will be the dominant strategy. As long as the algorithm favours emotional content, emotional content will flourish. As long as dating app mechanics are integrated into the user experience, users will behave as they do on dating apps.

Microsoft, which owns LinkedIn, could intervene. It could modify algorithms to penalise inappropriate behaviours, implement more effective message filters, restore a clearer distinction between professional platform and generalist social network. It does not do so because those behaviours, that toxic engagement, that artificial urgency, are precisely what keeps the figures healthy.

Indeed, at this point one might as well be consistent. An unsolicited suggestion for Satya Nadella: add a live chat function. That way Jane Doe needn't wait for me to read messages; she can propose intimate encounters in real time. Perhaps with animated reactions and stickers. While we're at it, a "super like" system for particularly interesting profiles. And why not a "who's nearby" section to facilitate professional encounters. The circle would finally be complete.

In the meantime, for those wishing to replicate the experiment: change your profile photograph and observe. The results are, in the most clinical sense of the term, illuminating. You will notice an increase in profile views, connection requests, messages. And you will notice that a not insignificant percentage of these messages will have a subtext bearing little relation to professional networking.

As for Jane Doe, I hope she found what she was looking for. Not on LinkedIn, preferably. And I hope that when she finds it, reality corresponds to the image. For both parties.

But optimism, as they say, is the last thing to die.

Along with, perhaps, professional decorum. And the capacity to distinguish a person from a retouched photograph.