Experiously Origins

I joined LinkedIn when it had a few hundred thousand users. Back then it was a different place. You could write a long article and get tens, sometimes hundreds, of comments from people who'd actually read it. I had real conversations there. Often gripping ones. With a consultant in York who'd rebuilt his career twice. With a retired engineer in New York who'd lived through three recessions. And sometimes, something extraordinary. With royalty. With a Space Shuttle astronaut. With CEOs of companies everyone has heard of. With a Bitcoin pioneer. And even with Reid Hoffman, the man who built the place. Not follows. Not likes. Conversations. Real shared experience.

Around 2021, something changed. I can't prove it was COVID. I can only tell you that's when the LinkedIn I'd known for eighteen years stopped feeling like the LinkedIn I'd known. Posts got shorter. Faces got more polished. Pitches got sharper. Articles that used to get thousands of views quietly stopped being seen. The feed started moving at the speed of TikTok, and depth started to count against you.

I started writing less. Then writing differently. Shorter, punchier, polished, performed. And then at some point I can't quite place, I caught myself polishing something I knew was true until the truth had gone soft at the edges.

That was the moment the drift stopped being the platform's and started being mine.

There's a name for what happened. I call it achievement culture.

Achievement culture is the quiet idea that you only really exist when other people can see you winning. Post the win. Hit the numbers. Shout the result. Keep shouting, because the moment you stop, you disappear. It isn't vanity. It's just how a platform works when it rewards being seen and pays nothing for being real.

Twenty years in, I realised the place I'd built my voice on couldn't hold the things I most wanted to say anymore. Not because LinkedIn got worse. Because LinkedIn got built for something else. For achievement culture. For being seen.

LinkedIn built me an audience. It introduced me to people I'd never have found. For most of my career it was one of the quiet engines of my life. If you're reading this, it's probably been one of yours too.

Being seen and being understood are two different things. Being seen is something you do to yourself. You post, you refresh, you watch the numbers, and the loop stays private even when the audience is public. Being understood needs someone else. Someone paying real attention. Someone sitting with what you said long enough for it to mean something. You can't fake that with how often you post. You can't get there through the algorithm. And you can't do it in a format built for the ten-second glance.

I've watched articles I was proud of disappear within hours. I've written things I believed deeply and felt them land nowhere. None of that is LinkedIn's fault. It's the fault of what the format has become, and the achievement culture that came with it.

So I built somewhere else.

Not to replace LinkedIn. LinkedIn is still the front door. Experiously is the room behind it. Longer, quieter, permanent. Built around experience, not performance. What you lived. What you learned. The whole shape of a real thing, not a highlight reel.

And to LinkedIn, honestly: thank you. You gave me the voice that lets me even write this. I'm not going anywhere. I'm just building the other room.

If any of that sounds like the thing you've been missing, you've found the right room.

Chris, Team Experiously