Happy to announce that I'm quitting LinkedIn! 🔥

Let me explain.

I started being very active on LinkedIn four months ago to grow my newsletter.

Some posts went viral.

Numbers went up.

But here's what actually happened with that goal:

→ Newsletter growth from LinkedIn: less than 2%

→ Newsletter growth from SEO and Substack: over 98%

People didn’t really convert to my newsletter.

On the other hand, SEO especially has been exploding the last two months hitting 5.8k+ clicks in January.

But the math isn't even the main reason I'm leaving.

The real problem is what LinkedIn required me to become to even stay in the game.

Here's how LinkedIn growth works: you need engagement.

Which means commenting on other people's posts. A lot of them. Every day.

And I get it—everyone's doing it because we're all trying to grow. The platform rewards it.

You comment, they comment back, the algorithm notices, everyone's numbers go up.

But somewhere along the way, I started catching myself typing things like "Great resource, thanks!" and "Great list, I learned a lot!"

Fast, empty comments just to hit my engagement quota.

The exact kind of thing I'd see on my own posts and know wasn't real.

I wasn't trying to be fake. It wasn’t my intention.

I was just trying to keep up.

Comment fast enough, on enough posts, to stay visible.

But that speed kills sincerity.

You can't leave 20 thoughtful comments a day. So you start performing interest you don't feel. You comment on posts you don't actually care about.

You say things that sound engaged without being engaged.

And I realized: we're all trapped in this.

Most of the comments I get are probably written the same way. In fact, it was all AI-generated. I get it, people just trying to survive the engagement hamster wheel.

Nobody's really there. They’re all just... performing like they were really there.

So here's what I'm doing instead with these extra 1-2 hours a day I got back from LinkedIn:

1️⃣ Improving my existing posts for SEO.

2️⃣ Increasing my publishing frequency on Substack.

3️⃣ Experimenting with more new AI tools (ofc, this is my main job!).

4️⃣ Refining my agentic writing workflow.

5️⃣ Engaging on Substack where I actually want to comment because the posts are interesting.

I’m also considering becoming more active on X because it’s the primary source of AI news, and most people I respect are there.

LinkedIn to me is just a draining social platform because the game it makes you play—fast, surface-level engagement to feed an algorithm—turns everyone into a less genuine version of themselves.

And when the platform taking that toll is only driving less than 2% of your results? It's not worth it—especially when I already know where my focus should be.

I just can't keep doing something that makes me less of who I want to be.

So I'm taking that energy and putting it where it actually builds something that I really enjoy!