LinkedIn seems to be on a mission to kill off good writing

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From my experience, people who use LinkedIn tend to do so for three reasons: to look for a new job; to show off about a work promotion; or, most likely, to keep tabs on their nemesis, mostly as a way to reassure themselves that they didn’t peak in secondary school.

Yet while most people will likely spend less than 10 minutes a day on the “social media network for professionals”, it has fast become one of the most popular platforms on the internet, one that is worth $26bn, and boasts over half a billion daily active users – a number that far surpasses platforms such as Twitter.

How can this janky platform – one which is a struggle to browse, difficult to search for people on and useless for industry news – be so popular? It may have less to do with job hunting than self-publishing. Since 2014, LinkedIn has heavily invested in LinkedIn Pulse, a free-to-use service that provides publishing tools to rival those of Wordpress and Medium. Like those publishing tools, Pulse provides users with a blank canvas in which they can write whatever they want.

Initially, LinkedIn billed these publishing tools as ways in which companies and entrepreneurs could better communicate with job seekers and clients. In the past few years, however, as self-publishing on LinkedIn has become more popular, the platform has focused on developing a codified system of writing on the internet – one that has not only transferred into other social media platforms, but also major news publications including Forbes and the Wall Street Journal.

It’s likely you’ll have seen this kind of writing before.

It consists of relatively short sentences.

Each line of the paragraph is double spaced.

It begins with a dull anecdote or observation.

Followed by an “inspirational”, cliched life lesson.

And a reminder that to make your life better, you just need a positive mindset.

Ending on a simple promise: share this post and you’ll be more successful in business.

In 2017, BuzzFeed defined this style of writing as “Broetry” – a combination of jargon from self-help books, viral motivational quotes you really only see shared on Facebook, and distilled chapters from airport books on starting a multimillion-dollar business. When put together, it becomes a style that, while lacking flourish and thoughtful prose, finds its value in its visual aesthetic.

To put it more succinctly, Broetry takes up space, is difficult to ignore or simply skim past. It’s a type of writing that exists primarily to attract attention. Because of this, LinkedIn’s top writers – often working in marketing and communications – say that their posts regularly gather millions of views, and hundreds of thousands of shares, without any need to use metric measuring software, headline testing or marketing focus groups. The format has become so popular among LinkedIn’s professionals that there are even Broems satirising Broems, and fake Broems that routinely get mistaken for sincere ones.

It might be easy to dismiss this writing style as native to LinkedIn. But, over the past year or so, it has migrated to most other platforms, especially Twitter, where a growing community of entrepreneurs, mostly in the cryptocurrency and NFT space, regularly spout “inspirational” business advice, using the Broetry format in long threads to ensure maximum exposure and virality. Indeed, while these threads might not get the same level of engagement as they do on LinkedIn, it’s not uncommon that Broems posted onto Twitter can regularly receive hundreds, if not thousands, of retweets. In fact, the format has become so popular that there are courses, costing thousands of dollars, which teach you how to write them.

Some readers might consider Broems to be mundane, readily dismissing them. To my mind, however, they represent a darker path that internet culture is heading toward, one in which creative, artistic originality and experimentation are constrained by the demands of content-driven platforms that prefer rip-offs, reproductions and imitations, over cultivating and supporting original ideas. Broetry encompasses all of this: a style of writing devoid of imagination, relying heavily on repackaging self-help mantras, and curating quotes from pop-psychology books. Much like other forms of online content, Broetry imitates each other to serve a singular purpose: gaming platform algorithms in order to go viral and to give the writer as much personal publicity as possible.

Indeed, this is more than evident on platforms such as YouTube, where reaction videos (and reaction or reaction videos) are among the most popular genres of content, while influencers such as Mr Beast can garner millions of views, shares and significant ad revenue from recreating elements of popular TV shows, such as Squid Game, turning it into viral content, and dismissing the social and political commentary of the original. As Vice’s Gita Jackson puts it: “There is no shortage of people who make original art and put it online, but the internet is dominated instead by people who can take advantage of existing properties and fan bases.”

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The dominance of streaming platforms has meant that reboots and sequels are already entrenched into TV and movies, while in other cultural industries, platforms like TikTok have had such an impact that even the length of tracks are tailored toward going viral as fast as possible.

The encroachment by tech has constrained creative output and harmed artists, in the form of lower pay, unstable work conditions and contracts that deny creators the right to their own intellectual property. At the same time, the dominance of algorithmic technology means that it’s no longer commercially viable to give new artists the chance to create different things or tell different stories. Instead, tech platforms chasing continual growth would much rather we create easily consumable, shareable and relatable content. Their economic value depends on it.

It’s not inconceivable that, in having commodified art, music and film, tech platforms wouldn’t see written words as their next target. It’s not to say that we’ll see the end of books any time soon, or that the paragraph will be a relic of a previous era. But, just as tech companies have changed the way we watch, listen and observe art, the rise of Broetry may also force a cultural shift – one in which we do not value writing based on substance, style or ability to illustrate the complex facets of the human experience, but rather determine “good” writing by the number of likes, shares and engagements.