LinkedIn Stories

» see linkedin.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

Most of the graves on this site are things I miss. This one is a feature that lived and died inside my professional adulthood, on a platform every engineer has an account on, and I could not tell you a single thing anybody posted to it. That is not distance in the geographic sense. It is closer to having walked past a shop every day for a year and being unable to describe the window.

LinkedIn Stories started as a pilot in Brazil in February 2020 and spread through the Netherlands, the UAE, Australia and France. It reached the United States and Canada in the week of 24 September 2020, as part of a full site redesign. Same mechanic as everywhere else: a row of circles above the feed, and a photo or short video that was gone in twenty-four hours.

The reception was immediate and it was mockery. Snapchat's format had been built for people showing friends what they were doing right now, and the request to bring that energy to a network where the primary activity is announcing a promotion produced something nobody had a template for. The genre that emerged was mostly conference corridors and desk setups, posted by people who had decided that being early to a feature was itself a professional signal.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the copy wave ~

Instagram shipped Stories in August 2016, took the format from Snapchat without much pretense, and within two years had more people using the copy than used the original. That result set off a decade of product decisions across the industry. WhatsApp got Status and Facebook got Stories. YouTube, Skype, Spotify and even Netflix all shipped some version of a horizontal row of circles.

LinkedIn was the last major network to arrive, in 2020, four years after the mechanic had been proven and roughly two years after it had stopped being novel anywhere. Twitter reached the same place at nearly the same time with Fleets, launched globally in November 2020 and killed on 3 August 2021. LinkedIn's announcement came four weeks after that, and the two of them closed the wave together.

~ what linkedin said out loud ~

The 31 August 2021 post is worth reading because product teams almost never write this down. LinkedIn said it had assumed people wanted a lightweight and casual way to post video, and that what people actually wanted was to make video that lasted and that told a professional story properly. The feature would end on 30 September and the team would work on something durable instead.

Part of the announcement's purpose was administrative. Advertisers had bought inventory that ran between Stories, and that spend had to be moved into the main feed before the slot stopped existing. The rest of it was a company saying in plain language that it had copied a format without first checking whether its own users had asked for it.

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