Author: William Lise

Long-term (49-plus years) resident of Japan. Former electrical engineer and have been translating and interpreting for over four decades.

Enshittification of LinkedIn on the March

I have watched for some time the LinkedIn coaches selling coaching to desperate LinkedIn users who want to get jobs or achieve “LinkedIn success,” whatever that might mean (probably very little).

I now find from my LinkedIn slop feed that there are coaches on LinkedIn selling coaching to help people get work on, of all places, the click-work platform Upwork.

I am not surprised to see that numerous posts on LinkedIn to sell Upwork coaching are from people in places like Nigeria, Ghana, and Pakistan, which are probably home to many power users of click-work platforms like Upwork.

The proliferation of these Upwork coaching ads on LinkedIn says speaks about not only the people who use Upwork, but also the progressive enshittification of the platform LinkedIn itself. LinkedIn was never a good place for freelancers to find meaningful work, and now it is acting to promote coaching for users of an even less meaningful platform.

The end is near. No, wait, the end is not near. I think we might be seeing the end already, but these platforms are supported by countless desperate users trying to survive.

Sucking on your addictive LinkedIn security blanket?

For too many people in certain domains—translation is one of them—LinkedIn is an addictive security blanket, wrapped in and protected by a delusion that is promoted by a company that knows that selling addictive delusions. particularly to a population of people who are confused and uneasy about the future, is highly profitable.

Religions have worked that game for as long as they have existed. In a sense, because LinkedIn users, similar to people claiming to have a faith, apparently don’t require evidence to believe in something, belief in the platform could be treated as a religion, without the tax exemption, of course

Microsoft fed me a post recently from a freelance translator that evoked over a hundred comments. The post and the comments were discussing how to “succeed” and attain “reach” by posting on LinkedIn.

What in the world are these people talking about? Does harvesting a large number of impressions and comments (by colleagues, not clients) on LinkedIn mean success? Does it gain translators clients that pay them money? The evidence of that is extremely slim, and nobody seems to even bring that aspect of the platform up. It’s the irrelevant elephant in the living room where people are talking about LinkedIn “success” and “reach” as if these meant something on a social media platform that purports to be a business networking platform but is actually nothing of the kind for translators.

I’ve heard a number of translator colleagues say they made a LinkedIn account but got nothing from it, and they far outnumber that ones who say that they have acquired clients because of their LinkedIn presence. Although I wonder about what kind of clients and the veracity of such claims—LinkedIn has an established reputation as a bullshitting platform—such cases might exist, but with AI-using agencies far along in their move away from professional translators, the constellation of conditions, circumstances, and skills required for freelancers to acquire the direct clients they need to *perhaps* survive means that the value of interacting on LinkedIn approaches zero.

The freelance translators most likely to survive will be those who realize the value of real-world networking with potential clients. LinkedIn is not the real world they need to be active in. Translators who don’t understand what that means and don’t try to find out will not survive, and it is safe to say that most won’t.

There will be a small number of exceptional survivors, of course, but the drastically changed reality will preclude most freelance translators from surviving.

I’ll make this short.

If you’re a freelance translator and thinking of continuing to work for translation agencies, your chances of surviving by translating more than another year or two are extremely slim.

If you can change careers entirely or at least break away from AI-using agencies —in 2026, this means the agencies that support almost all freelancers—you might survive for a while. But most freelancers can’t break away from agencies, because of their circumstances, their preferences and personalities, or their skill sets. For them, it is over—finished, gone, and not coming back.

Accordingly, I will be providing no further writings directed at freelance translators, although I have made some legacy writings and presentations available on the parent website.