← Ideas Distribution 2 min

They banned the em dash, not the slop

LinkedIn spent a month arguing about whether the em dash means you're a robot. Everyone missed the actual point.

LinkedIn spent a month arguing about whether an em dash means you are a robot. Everyone missed the point.

Half the feed decided a punctuation mark proves you used AI. The other half started deleting every dash to look human.

Meanwhile LinkedIn quietly turned down the reach of generic posts. Not AI posts. Generic ones.

The platform does not care what tool you wrote with. It cares whether anyone but you could have written it.

So removing your dashes changes nothing if the post is still something a thousand people could have posted.

The only test that matters: delete every line that could be about any company. Whatever is left is the post.

Stop hunting punctuation. Say the one thing only you could say.

How many of your last posts would survive that test?

The move. Insight/entertainment - the AI-slop crackdown is about originality, not tells; delete-the-generic is the real fix.

LinkedIn's AI-slop crackdown is about point of view, not punctuation. People are policing tells instead of writing something only they could write.


One of the things Alex keeps saying about go-to-market distribution. See the rest →

Loud on purpose

Like how I think?
Come along.

New takes most weeks. Follow the thinking, or ask me what I do at Reach.