Open LinkedIn right now and scroll through your feed. Within 30 seconds, you'll notice something: despite being written by different people in different industries with different experiences, a shocking amount of content sounds identical.
Same structures. Same tone. Same safe, corporate-friendly observations dressed up as insights.
This isn't a coincidence. There are specific forces pushing LinkedIn content toward sameness — and understanding them is the first step to standing out.
The template epidemic
LinkedIn content creation has been industrialized. There are courses, templates, and frameworks for every type of post. "Use the AIDA framework." "Start with a hook." "End with a call to action."
These aren't bad advice individually. The problem is that when everyone follows the same playbook, everything sounds like it came from the same playbook.
You've seen the patterns:
- The "I got rejected from my dream job / fired / failed" opening that pivots to an inspirational lesson
- The numbered list of "things I wish I knew earlier"
- The "controversial" opinion that's actually completely uncontroversial
- The "I'm grateful for..." post that's really a humble brag
Templates are training wheels. They help you start, but at some point you have to take them off or you'll never develop your own style.
The AI sameness problem
The explosion of AI writing tools has accelerated the homogenization. When millions of people use the same models to generate content, the output converges toward a shared mean.
AI-generated content has tells: perfect grammar, balanced sentence structures, a tendency toward lists and frameworks, and a conspicuous absence of personal details or rough edges. It's competent but characterless.
The irony is that people use AI to save time on content creation, but the time saved is wasted if nobody engages with the output. A generic post that gets zero comments is worse than no post at all.
The fear of being specific
Most people write for the broadest possible audience. They avoid specific details, industry jargon, and personal opinions because they're afraid of alienating someone.
This instinct is exactly backwards. Specificity is what makes content memorable. When you write for everyone, you connect with no one.
Think about the LinkedIn posts you actually remember. They almost certainly included specific details: a real conversation, a specific number, a named company, a particular situation. The details are what made them stick.
The engagement trap
LinkedIn rewards engagement, so people optimize for it. They write polls because polls get clicks. They use engagement bait because it gets comments. They post feel-good stories because they get likes.
But engagement without substance is empty. And over time, audiences develop a filter for it. The same tricks that worked a year ago now get eye-rolls.
Sustainable engagement comes from substance. Say something worth responding to, and people will respond.
How to actually sound different
Use your real voice
The way you talk to a friend about your work is your real voice. It's probably more casual, more opinionated, and more interesting than the way you write on LinkedIn.
The gap between your speaking voice and your writing voice is where authenticity gets lost. The closer you can bring your writing to how you actually talk, the more distinctive your content will be.
This is one of the reasons voice-first content creation is so effective. When you talk about your work in a natural conversation, the output already sounds like you. There's no translation layer stripping out your personality.
Share what only you can share
Generic advice can come from anyone. But your specific experiences — the decisions you've made, the results you've seen, the mistakes you've lived through — those are yours alone.
Before you write a post, ask: "Could someone who hasn't had my experience write this?" If the answer is yes, dig deeper. Find the angle that's uniquely yours.
Be willing to be wrong
The safest posts are the most forgettable. When you share a strong opinion, you risk pushback. You also create the opportunity for real conversation.
Some of the best LinkedIn discussions happen in the comments of a post that someone disagreed with. That's not failure — that's engagement with substance.
Stop polishing
Rough edges are features, not bugs. A post that feels slightly unfinished, slightly imperfect, slightly raw reads as more authentic than one that's been edited to sterile perfection.
This doesn't mean being sloppy. It means not sanitizing every trace of personality from your writing.
The differentiation advantage
As LinkedIn becomes more crowded with generic, AI-generated, template-driven content, the opportunity for people who sound genuinely different only grows.
The bar for standing out is paradoxically getting lower. You don't need to be a great writer. You just need to sound like yourself — specific, opinionated, and human.
In a sea of sameness, authenticity is the ultimate algorithm hack.