Everyone’s a thought leader. Almost no one is thinking.
The article critiques the current state of LinkedIn, arguing that it has devolved into a platform where superficial attempts at thought leadership dominate. It emphasizes the importance of genuine thinking over the lazy repackaging of ideas facilitated by AI tools. The author encourages individuals to disconnect from social media and engage in deep, personal reflection and reading instead.
- ▪LinkedIn has shifted from meaningful exchanges to a focus on superficial thought leadership.
- ▪Many users resort to AI-generated content rather than original thinking.
- ▪The article advocates for deep thinking and personal reflection over the pursuit of being seen as a thought leader.
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Story provenance
Source · retrieval · rights · ranking — open for full record
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Attribution is not the same as permission. This drawer separates discovery metadata, excerpts, WeSearch-generated summaries, reuse status, and whether the publisher receives the visit. Nothing here claims a legal grant the publisher has not made.
Record
| Original publisher | Bernste |
| Canonical URL | https://bernste.in/writings/everyones-a-thought-leader-almost-no-one-is-thinking/ |
| Publication time | Mon, 25 May 2026 07:35:51 GMT |
| Retrieval time | 2026-05-25T07:37:36.533Z |
| Last seen | 2026-05-25T07:37:36.533Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | 72d7G_ab9sTt |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
Everyone's a thought leader. Almost no one is thinking. May 13, 2026 LinkedIn has never been a great social network, but in the not-so-distant past, there was a time where people put effort into curating their personal image and brand. Sometimes there would even be some sort of meaningful exchange between individuals. That ship has long sailed. LinkedIn is still useful for finding a job, but the social aspect is an unusable cesspool of AI slop, and has been for quite a while. One core problem is that folks on LinkedIn want to be seen as thought leaders. If you aren’t trying to be a thought leader, are you even trying at life? The cost of attempting to become a thought leader has never been cheaper.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Bernste.
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