Bas Dijkstra

Bas Dijkstra

I teach you how to get valuable product feedback, fast with test automation

Time for another LinkedIn break

This post was published on December 20, 2025

For a couple of years now, I have tried to stop wasting so much time faffing about on the Internet in general and on LinkedIn in particular. I’ve gone on a couple of, admittedly not very successful, LinkedIn breaks before (see here and here), breaks from which I always returned after a few weeks, in part because old habits are hard to break, but mostly because as an independent consultant, I feel like I need to be visible online in some way, and LinkedIn has always been my platform of choice.

However, it is high time to get serious about stepping away from LinkedIn for an extended period of time, for a range of reasons.

I am tired of the constant distraction that LinkedIn, like all other social media platforms, offers, and the negative effect it has on being able to read, write, code, and do other types of meaningful work. And that negative effect has been profound. I’ve not written long-form blog posts on a regular basis for a long while. I’ve not read nearly as many books that are mentally engaging as I wanted to, sticking mostly to cheap and fairly superficial thrillers instead. It is time to turn that around.

I’m also looking forward to further building and delivering my brand new ‘Valuable feedback, fast’ course in the next few months, and that’ll require a lot of thinking, writing and programming time, too. I intend this to be my best and most valuable course yet, and I’ve got my work cut out for me to achieve that.

Outside of work, I’ve started training for a couple of pretty challenging cycling events that have been on my bucket list for a couple of years, and as I’m not getting any younger, it’s probably high time I do get more serious about that training, too. Cycling takes a lot of time and energy, and I could use more of that, so dropping a time and energy drain like LinkedIn for a while makes sense to me.

The AI-powered enshittification of LinkedIn also really hasn’t been helping. Don’t get me wrong. AI, when used prudently, can be a very valuable tool in test automation, software development as well as in other parts of life. But the amount of AI-generated crap posts, the ridiculous amount of AI-generated comments to those posts and the abundance of AI fanfolks who didn’t just drink the Kool-Aid but who are positively drowning in it have taken most of the value and ‘fun’ (insofar social media can be fun) out of LinkedIn for me.

So, from today on, I’ll maybe check in once every week or so (and hopefully even less frequently over time) to answer direct messages and redirect conversations to email. Other than that, you won’t see me on LinkedIn for a while. As before, I’ll be using Freedom to help me stay off.

How long this break is going to last, I don’t know. I’m aiming for a year. Longer is better. Six months is the absolute minimum.

If you’d like to stay in touch in the meantime, there’s a few ways to do so:

  • Email is best for questions and inquiries: bas@ontestautomation.com
  • If you’d like to stay up to date with my writing, you can bookmark my blog or add its RSS feed to your reader of choice
  • For conversations (and I want to have more of those), I’m happy to set up a meeting (online or in person) or a phone call, so email me and we’ll work something out

I’ll also make an effort to attend and contribute to more in-person events in 2026, so I hope to catch some of you there. You probably won’t see me at a lot of conferences abroad, though.

Cheers!

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