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LinkedIn has never been fashionable.
Which is probably why it still works. It came up recently on an episode of The Rest is Entertainment, where Richard Osman and Marina Hyde discussed its current prominence with the wide-eyed surprise of people who’ve only just noticed the water they’re swimming in. Osman admitted he’d previously seen it as a holding pen for PR and marketing jobs – “a super lucrative joke”, in his words.
What’s striking to me is that they were talking about LinkedIn at all. A platform once dismissed as a corporate punchline has become visible enough, relevant enough, culturally present enough to warrant airtime on a podcast dedicated to media and entertainment. That alone says more than they probably realised.
Osman and Hyde clearly sensed the shift, even if they didn’t quite know what to do with it. With audible discomfort, they acknowledged that LinkedIn now seems to be hosting serious conversations. “It’s full of interesting people saying interesting things,” Osman offered. He sounded faintly horrified.
Fair enough. But also: where have they been?
LinkedIn hasn’t suddenly reinvented itself. It just kept doing what it does, and its users slowly made it better. The tone changed. The posts got sharper. More people started to pay attention – though not all at once. Because if you’ve written off digital spaces as trivial, it’s easy to miss when they start doing serious things.
Admittedly, I work in digital, so I’m not a neutral observer. Understanding how platforms evolve is part of my job. I’ve also spent long enough watching digital work being disregarded as surface-level (“social media and stuff”) to know that many people still don’t take these spaces seriously, even as they do more to influence opinion than most headlines.
LinkedIn has been building towards this moment for years. Yes, it’s still clunky. Still awkward. Still full of algorithm-chasing earnestness, inspirational overreach, and a thriving genre of posts that are exactly the kind of “cringe” that’s catnip for social media cynics.
But it’s also one of the last places online where real names are used, influence is earned, expertise is shared, reputations are built, and professional communities can genuinely engage like professionals.
Just look at everything else. Instagram, weighed down by influencers and ads, feels more like a marketplace than a social platform. Threads, Bluesky, and Mastodon proved that being an alternative isn’t enough. TikTok is powerful, but not built for professional credibility – not yet. And X… is X. Against that backdrop, LinkedIn – unfashionable, uncool LinkedIn – feels remarkably sane.
In a way, that uncoolness is its edge. LinkedIn never tried to be culture. It didn’t pretend to be entertainment. What it kept was simple: a professional environment for sharing expertise with others who understand its value. As Osman put it, “every time you look at an article on LinkedIn, you go ‘oh, that’s actually really interesting’.” Exactly.
LinkedIn didn’t win by being exciting. It won by staying useful. Uncool, unflashy, and surprisingly resilient. It stayed in its lane. And the rest of the internet moved out of theirs.
So when he and Hyde marvel at LinkedIn as if it’s a sudden phenomenon, they’re not exactly wrong. But they are late. What they’re describing now, with more scepticism than insight, has been happening for a while. If you’ve been ignoring LinkedIn because it’s clunky or cringeworthy, fine. But it will still shape the world you live in.
LinkedIn may even be the closest thing we have to a functioning digital public square in 2025. A place where being interesting is more useful than being entertaining. Where people use their real names. And, apparently, where Richard Osman least expected to learn something.
