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I was scrolling through my newsfeed the other morning and saw one of those posts.
It’s the one with clean formatting, a confident hook, a few tidy bullets with arrows, and a final line that feels like a red bow.
It was genuinely well put together, but…
I felt nothing.
I wasn’t annoyed or impressed…I was kind of just “meh.”
Probably because I’d read a variation of that exact post a hundred different times.
So, I scrolled by without a like or a comment.
Does that make me mean?
Anyway, that polished format we all got trained to write in, a byproduct of AI usage, now feels like LinkedIn’s default.
Even the smartest people you know’s content is starting to read like a machine typed it and slapped their name on it (which likely happened).
You can be a sharp, experienced, genuinely insightful person and still publish something that sounds like our gal, Claude, sent it over.
So let me tell you what I'm watching cut through instead.
The short posts.
They’re the one- or two-liners that I admittedly used to write off as engagement bait.
In a way, I owe those posts an apology. They had it half right.
Because…
A lot of short posts ARE bait. The ones with the soulless “Agree?” after a recycled platitude.
Those suck, and I still roll my eyes hard enough I could do a somersault.
The good ones are showing me there's an actual person on the other side of the screen.
You can't prompt your way to a genuine, slightly annoyed, specific human thought. That has to come from a human who was actually annoyed and chose to say so.
Which brings me to the gut check I want to leave you with this week.
I’m calling it the “Noise or Not Test,” and it's one question you ask before you hit publish.
Does this say enough to get someone to act, not just react?
That's it.
And the reason it works is that "act" does the heavy lifting.
Nobody acts on a line that could have come from any account in the feed.
“The LinkedIn algorithm StInKs…. Agree?”
The anyone-could-write-this posts earn a thumbs up and a scroll, nothing more.
But a post with a real point in it makes someone reply, or send it to a coworker, or screenshot it, or stop and write their own version underneath.
Action is the tell, filtering out AI sameness and empty bait in the same move, because neither ever earns it.
Let me show you what I mean with one of mine.
Last week, I jumped on a trending meme (GASP!!).
The format was already out there; everybody had access to it, so the meme itself was just the delivery.
The only thing that made it mine was the spin I put on it:
It pulled 47 reactions, four new followers and 22 comments, and they weren't "haha so true."
People wrote back with their own takes.
They were building on it.
I passed the test with flying colors.
You already know this is true, by the way. Think of the people whose short posts you stop for. You probably do it because the person said something you agree with, relate to, or disagree with in a way that genuinely feels like them.
So before your next post, run the test.
The polished version isn't the safe choice anymore. Switch things up and try saying the smaller, truer, only-you thing instead.
That just might be the post people act on.
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