Meg Peppin tagged me in a post a couple of weeks ago asking if I was still blogging. She’d noticed that a few people whose writing she liked seemed to have vanished from LinkedIn and wondered where we’d all gone.

I haven’t gone anywhere. I publish on my website every day and on LinkedIn on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays. But I know what she means, because it happens to me too. There are people I’ve been connected to for years whose posts I almost never see. Then I’ll end up on someone’s profile for some other reason and find they’ve been writing all along, sharing good stuff, having conversations I’d have jumped into if I’d had the faintest idea they were going on.

A few people said to use the notification bell. Which is fine, except I forget it’s there. And honestly, do I want a ping every time someone posts? I thought that was what the feed was for.

What made me think about Meg’s question was how nearly everything written about the LinkedIn algorithm is about getting seen. How many impressions did my post get? Why has my engagement dropped? What does LinkedIn want from us this week? Meg wasn’t asking any of that. She wasn’t asking why people weren’t seeing her posts. She was asking why she wasn’t seeing theirs.

That’s a question I don’t hear very often. We talk about building networks as if connecting with someone keeps them in your life somehow. It doesn’t, not really. Not when the thing keeping you in touch is a feed that decides what you get to see. People don’t leave. They just stop turning up, and you don’t notice because there’s always something else to look at.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t want to see everything everyone writes. Nobody does. But these are people I chose. I connected with them because I wanted to know what they were thinking, and now I mostly don’t.

So I’m going to try going looking for them instead of waiting for the feed to bring them to me. We’ll see how long that lasts.