People love LinkedIn cringe on instagram and twitter - but on LinkedIn itself you have to confront the reality that these people, often colleagues / former colleagues etc. are being serious
I doubt many are being serious.
Business culture (at least in the US) is so steeped in lying and general fake-ness that in-group signaling as "real business person" involves public performances of bullshit.
It's what you're supposed to do in interviews: bullshit just the right way, to show you understand the game and are willing to debase yourself to play it. Otherwise you're "risky", either due to excessive commitment to ethical principles or to being too clueless or inept to play the game right. That's what's going on, on LinkedIn. "Humility" and "realness" even have to be faked just the right way.
It's incredibly gross.
If you crack and admit it’s fake, everything falls apart and it’s your fault. Expulsion out onto the street follows.
Even worse, now everyone else is going ‘how could you be so dumb to believe it’ and/or ‘you sure fucked up by admitting it was fake’ all at the same time.
Not necessarily mutually exclusive. It's like professional wrestling, stage magic, or politics. Some lies people really love.
My experience has been that Mormons are generally self-aware, polite, and willing the engage in interesting conversation.
In contrast, LinkedIn influencers' eyes glaze over whenever you try to dig into the details of what they're purporting to talk about. Because, ugh, nerd stuff that's beneath them.
It's much the same as the people who get books ghostwritten and say "I wrote a book". It doesn't matter if you understand someone else wrote it, if you say that in your head or out loud enough, your brain will treat it as reality and you will think it to be reality, and that will effect future thinking and feeling.
It doesn't matter if you are playing a character. Play it convincingly enough and it WILL bleed into your reality.