Matt earned LinkedIn Top Voice a couple of years back the hard way — no AI, just writing a steady stream of his own thought pieces until the editors noticed. So when he says he’s changed his relationship with the platform, it’s not sour grapes. It’s clarity. He walks through the thing most creators never reckon with: LinkedIn’s revenue engine is, and has long been, recruiting. Talent Solutions was nearly two-thirds of its revenue before Microsoft bought it and remains the largest segment today, and the platform’s newest AI hiring tools alone just crossed a $450 million run rate. That’s the god the platform actually serves. It wants everyone in the pool so recruiters pay a premium to fish in it — which is exactly why Top Voice badges, LinkedIn groups, and “post it and it’ll get shared” never delivered the community or the leads they seemed to promise. You and the platform are serving different purposes.
So what should you do instead? Not abandon LinkedIn — keep it semi-fresh, publish a newsletter there, repurpose it to Substack and beyond — but put it firmly in its place and stop letting it eat your week. The deeper move is to tend your roots. Unless you’re an expat or living somewhere without a local market, the biggest quiet mistake Matt sees is neglecting local networking for the online kind: the grocery-store, coffee-shop, kids-at-the-same-school relationships are the strongest bonds, and your online presence works best when it reinforces those rather than replacing them. Underneath all of it is the fundamental he keeps returning to: none of the posting matters without a genuine point of view. Forced to choose between developing yours and cranking out AI content, he’d put the effort into the point of view every time. His end-of-week prompt: what is your relationship with the platforms you’re on — and are you serving your own life and business, or someone else’s?
