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What on earth is happening to content marketing? Social media marketing? The platforms we once hailed as groundbreaking are now breeding grounds for frustration—and I’m furious.

Let me say this outright: I’m not just reporting predictions for 2025; I’m angry about them. Because these aren’t just trends; they’re symptoms of a system that’s spiraling out of control.

Take this: 1.7 seconds. That’s the time Meta’s research says we have to grab someone’s attention. One-point-seven seconds. What an insult to creativity. To humanity. To the entire purpose of marketing—connection. And yet, here we are, reducing human attention to a fleeting blip, thanks to an ocean of nonsense content that we’ve let fester for years. It’s a mess, and it’s one we’ve created.

How did we get here? By lowering the bar so far that “engagement” became a numbers game. Lazy trends. Cringe-worthy hooks. The kind of stuff that makes you want to delete your apps and never look back. Remember those obnoxious "Stop scrolling!" videos? The ones barking at you to pay attention as if you were a distracted toddler? I’ve been raging against those for years. They were never clever, just manipulative. And now? Everyone’s tired of them. Finally. But what have we replaced them with? Multi-layered hooks. Frankenstein’s monsters of sound, visuals, and text desperately stitched together to eke out an extra second of engagement. It’s embarrassing.

And have you noticed YouTube thumbnails lately? Go check right now. What do you see? Creators pulling exaggerated faces, mouths wide open like they’ve just witnessed a UFO land in their backyard, hands glued to their cheeks as if they’re stuck in a bad remake of "Home Alone." It’s cringy, forced, and frankly exhausting. These exaggerated visuals are a perfect metaphor for where we’ve gone wrong—style over substance, spectacle over storytelling.

This isn’t marketing. It’s chasing algorithms like a dog chasing its tail. And it’s killing originality. Platforms demand compliance, punish creativity, and reward the loudest, most sensationalized nonsense. What used to be about storytelling and connection has been turned into a rat race for clicks. It’s maddening.

And then there’s the so-called “comeback” of long-form content. Platforms like YouTube and TikTok are suddenly preaching the gospel of depth. But let’s not fool ourselves into thinking this is some grand reawakening. It’s about retention metrics. Long-form never left because people stopped wanting it; it left because platforms shoved short-form down our throats. Now that short-form is saturated, they’re swinging the pendulum back to long-form to keep us glued longer. But at what cost? More forced “long” videos that lack substance because creators are just trying to hit a time threshold for monetization. It’s exhausting.

And let’s not ignore the elephant in the room: the damage this is doing to us as humans. To our kids. Shrinking attention spans. Constant overstimulation. A generation being raised to measure self-worth in views and likes. Are we okay with this? Because I’m not. We’re failing them by normalizing this circus of meaningless validation.

And LinkedIn? Let’s talk about LinkedIn. The "bottleneck" platform that looks like it hasn’t been updated since the 1990s. Have you ever stared at its clunky UI and wondered how a platform so critical to professional lives could feel so ancient? But design isn’t even the worst part. LinkedIn has become a theater of the absurd. Instead of focusing on enriching careers, exposing users to insightful content, or actually helping people find jobs, the platform is now Instagram 2017—but with business titles slapped onto profiles.

Go on your feed. What do you see? People shoving promotions down your throat, sharing how “happy” they are at companies they’ll likely leave within a year. Let’s not kid ourselves—those same people are fighting the daily grind of bills, deadlines, and laundry like the rest of us. But sure, let’s pretend everything is sunshine and roses. Then there are the posts—the desperation for engagement is palpable. Random beach photos paired with captions about EDI, sustainability, or business strategy.

It’s laughable, but it’s also irritating. What has LinkedIn become? A parade of humblebrags and performative professionalism. And the platform loves it. Why wouldn’t it? Cringe gets eyeballs. Eyeballs get ads. Ads get revenue. It’s a broken ecosystem that’s been left to fester because, let’s face it, nobody cares.

And the job search experience? Don’t even get me started. It’s not just a toxic mix of false hope and algorithmic despair; it’s an outright charade. I have many close friends in the talent acquisition field, and do you know what they unanimously say? They don’t rely on LinkedIn. Why? Because it’s broken. Fake job posts, fake applicants, fake everything. Think about it—how many times have you seen someone proudly flaunting a “LinkedIn helped me find this job” badge? Once? Maybe twice? Now consider the thousands of job posts in any given city. Do the math. It doesn’t add up.

And let’s be real: LinkedIn isn’t designed to connect talent with opportunity. It’s designed to churn through candidates like a conveyor belt of disappointment. The platform’s facade of functionality masks a system that’s just as performative as its users’ feeds. Job seekers aren’t finding hope here; they’re finding hollow clicks and automated rejections. It’s frustrating, and everyone knows it, but nobody wants to say it out loud.

So what do I predict for LinkedIn? Nothing. Nothing will change. The platform will keep feeding on engagement bait instead of fixing what’s broken. Because why bother when the system is profitable as is?

And then there’s AI. The darling of 2025. AI promises to make us more creative, more efficient, more everything. I’ve even explored the incredible potential of AI in previous articles and dedicated an entire podcast episode, “The AI Advantage,” to it. If you haven’t checked it out yet, you should. AI is a fantastic assistant when treated as one—not a peer. But here’s the harsh reality: AI, for all its promise, has spent the past year doing little more than regurgitating what already exists online. Thanks to humans, it’s become a recycling machine, which is exactly why Google has declared war on AI-generated content with their recent updates. Thank you, Google.

But there’s a dark side to AI. It makes us lazy and complacent. We’re over-depending on it. AI should not be writing your social media captions—any marketer with a day’s experience should be able to do that. AI should help us research, broaden our horizons, and inspire us to think bigger. Tools like Perplexity exemplify this potential by providing a starting point for deeper inquiry, sparking ideas, and helping us explore connections we might not have considered. It’s about expanding our creativity, not outsourcing it. AI is meant to assist us, not replace us, and when used this way, it becomes a powerful enabler rather than a shortcut that erodes our skills. Because let’s be honest, AI is still lousy at doing the nuanced work of creativity and connection. It’s time to stop treating it as a crutch and start using it as the powerful tool it can be.

So here we are. Stuck in a cycle of creating for algorithms instead of people. Churning out content that’s fleeting and forgettable. Burning out our creativity and humanity to feed platforms that don’t care about either.

But I refuse to accept this. I’m angry, yes, but I’m also determined. Determined to fight for marketing that respects people. For content that values connection over clicks. For creativity that prioritizes substance over spectacle.

Because someone has to. Someone has to stand up and say, “Enough.” And it’s not just me—it’s all of us. Together, we have to demand better, expect more, and refuse to settle for this cycle of mediocrity. But what are we going to do about it? Nothing. Why? Because we’re the reason all this is happening! We’re the ones clicking on cringe, sharing the nonsense, and feeding the beast. Platforms thrive on our complicity.

So here’s the irony: while we scream for change, we scroll mindlessly. We say we want substance, yet we reward the spectacle. It’s laughable. It’s infuriating. It’s us.

If platforms won’t change, maybe we need to—by finally holding ourselves accountable. But hey, who am I kidding? Cringe gets eyeballs. Eyeballs get ads. Ads get revenue. And the cycle continues. Thanks, humans. Truly, well done.