Cultural Intelligence

The Pile-On Is Always Worse Than the Thing

McDonald's CEO took a tiny bite of his own burger on camera. The memes were funny. What wasn't funny was the flood of LinkedIn posts turning a 30-second clip into a masterclass on leadership. The commentary industrial complex—not the burger—is the real pollution.

McDonald's CEO Chris Kempczinski took a comically small bite of a Big Arch burger on camera in early February. The internet noticed a month later. The memes were funny. The Burger King response was funnier. And then LinkedIn happened.

Within hours of the clip going viral, thousands of self-appointed brand strategists, leadership coaches, and marketing consultants had descended on the moment like seagulls on a dropped french fry. Every one of them had a take. Every take was formatted identically. And every take said roughly the same thing: authenticity matters, leaders should use their own products, this is a masterclass in what not to do. Nobody needed a marketing columnist to tell them that Kempczinski looked uncomfortable eating a burger. But LinkedIn's incentive structure ensures that dozens of people will race to say it anyway.

The burger wasn't the problem. The pile-on was the problem. And the pile-on is always worse than the thing itself.

Nobody needed a marketing columnist to tell them that a CEO looked uncomfortable eating a burger. But LinkedIn's incentive structure ensures that dozens of people will race to say it anyway.

Here's what actually happened. On February 3, 2026, Kempczinski posted a promotional taste test of the Big Arch—McDonald's first major permanent menu addition since Chicken McNuggets in 1983—to his Instagram and LinkedIn accounts. He sat at his desk, called it a "product" multiple times, took what viewers universally described as a cartoonishly small nibble from the outer edge, and promised to eat the rest off-camera. The video sat unnoticed for nearly a month before exploding the weekend of March 1–2, just before the Big Arch's U.S. launch.

The accelerant was Burger King. Their official TikTok account reposted existing footage of U.S. president Tom Curtis taking a large, confident, messy bite of a Whopper—mayo on his face, casually asking for a napkin. Pop culture account @PopCrave posted the side-by-side comparison. Burger King's X account replied with a line about not hesitating when it's flame-grilled. The internet coined "burgermogged." It was, by any reasonable measure, a funny contrast. One executive looked like he'd never encountered fast food before; the other looked like he genuinely enjoyed his product.

But what happened next on LinkedIn was something else entirely. Within days, a parade of marketing columnists and self-appointed brand strategists descended. Mark Ritson published an Adweek column comparing Kempczinski to Warren Buffett. Retail Gazette analyzed how authenticity and corporateness operate on different frequencies. Marketing-Interactive interviewed industry professionals who called the clip performative. SmartCompany broke down "messenger-audience misalignment." DesignRush published a CEO content strategy framework. Crain's Chicago Business extracted leadership lessons.

Every one of these pieces follows the same template: take a 30-second viral clip, apply a veneer of strategic framework language, and present obvious observations as proprietary insight. The analysis is always roughly the same—executives should seem authentic; people can tell when you're not genuine; customers want leaders who use their own products—dressed up in enough business jargon to pass as expertise. The machinery is predictable because it's designed to be. Speed matters more than depth. And the algorithm rewards anyone who attaches themselves to a trending moment fast enough.

The formulaic LinkedIn post has a name: broetry. The term was coined by Bloomberg writer Lorcan Roche Kelly in 2017 and popularized by BuzzFeed News. The format was pioneered by Josh Fechter, a digital marketer who accumulated 200 million views on LinkedIn before being banned for platform manipulation. His technique exploited a specific algorithmic mechanic: short single-line paragraphs force readers to click "see more," which LinkedIn's algorithm interprets as a quality signal via its dwell-time metric. The more people click to expand, the more the algorithm promotes the post, regardless of whether the content justifies the expansion.

I've been tracking these patterns for years, and the formula has five consistent elements: a clickbait one-sentence opener the writer cannot substantiate ("Everyone thinks they understand marketing"), an emotionally charged personal anecdote casting the writer as hero, formatting that resembles poetry with excessive line breaks, and a clichéd closing—"Agree?" or "Let that sink in" or "Here's why this matters." The format is so predictable it generated its own parody ecosystem.

In 2024, marketer Bryan Shankman deliberately posted "I proposed to my girlfriend this weekend. Here's what it taught me about B2B sales." It received over 4,000 comments. Bloomberg covered it. The joke landed because—as Bloomberg noted—so many people believed he was serious. That's how far the platform has departed from its origins as a professional networking tool. When satire is indistinguishable from sincere content, the medium has a signal problem.

When satire is indistinguishable from sincere content, the medium has a signal problem.

The incentive structure is self-reinforcing. LinkedIn tests new posts with roughly 2–5% of your network in the first 60–90 minutes; early engagement determines broader distribution. Only about 5% of underperforming posts recover after a weak first hour. This creates enormous pressure to post something—anything—the moment a topic trends, because speed matters more than depth. The platform's own data shows a 42% year-over-year increase in content shared between 2021 and 2023, while only 1% of monthly users post weekly, generating 9 billion impressions. A tiny minority of prolific posters dominates the feed, and the algorithm rewards them for frequency and emotional engagement rather than expertise or originality.

The backlash has its own infrastructure now. The subreddit r/LinkedInLunatics has grown to over 670,000 members—nearly quadrupling in two years. Twitter parody account @StateOfLinkedIn has 174,000+ followers. @BestOfLinkedIn, founded by former SaaS executive JR Hickey, chronicles what he calls a "giant back-patting circle" where "people aren't even telling a version of the truth anymore."

Israeli marketer Tom Orbach created the Viral Post Generator, a tool that auto-generates parody LinkedIn posts at adjustable "cringe levels." It reached 2 million users and was acquired by Taplio within a week. The Guardian, Business Insider, BuzzFeed, and Gizmodo all covered it. Orbach's observation was surgical: the common denominator of viral LinkedIn posts was self-love bordering on narcissism.

The criticism spans comedy and journalism. Comedian Ken Cheng posts from the perspective of a draconian executive, calling LinkedIn a "façade." The Spectator described LinkedInfluencers as people who bark out soundbites with job titles like "Wisdom Activator" and "Learning Architect." Trung Phan's viral newsletter analysis identified three structural drivers: the "CV mask" forcing professional performance, HR and recruiters as the platform's real customers creating knock-on incentive effects, and an algorithm that is functionally "cringe-proof" because LinkedIn's Talent Solutions revenue keeps flowing regardless of feed quality.

Perhaps most tellingly, LinkedIn's own commissioned research confirms the problem. A 2021 Edelman-LinkedIn study found that a glut of low-quality content was diluting the perceived value of thought leadership among B2B decision-makers. By 2024, only 48% of decision-makers said the overall quality of thought leadership they consumed was good. Just 15% said it was very good or excellent. Meanwhile, over 54% of long-form LinkedIn posts are now estimated to be AI-generated. The signal-to-noise ratio is collapsing in real time.

LinkedIn's own research confirms the problem. Only 15% of B2B decision-makers rate the thought leadership they consume as very good or excellent. — Edelman-LinkedIn B2B Thought Leadership Impact Study

The LinkedIn pile-on isn't just annoying—it's a textbook illustration of several well-documented cognitive dynamics operating simultaneously. I want to walk through them because understanding the mechanics matters if you want to resist them.

Epistemic trespassing, a concept formalized by philosopher Nathan Ballantyne, describes experts who opine authoritatively outside their domain of competence. LinkedIn structurally incentivizes this. The platform rewards breadth of commentary over depth, encouraging a sales director to publish strategic brand analysis and a recruiter to offer product design hot takes. The algorithm doesn't distinguish between informed and uninformed commentary—it measures engagement. And engagement is domain-agnostic.

The Dunning-Kruger effect compounds this. Kruger and Dunning's foundational 1999 study demonstrated that individuals with the least competence in a domain systematically overestimate their abilities, while genuine experts tend toward caution. On LinkedIn, this creates a paradox: the most confident, prolific commentators on any trending topic are often the least qualified, while people with actual expertise produce less content because they understand the complexity they'd need to address. The meta-cognitive deficit—lacking the expertise to recognize one's own lack of expertise—ensures a steady supply of authoritative-sounding takes from people who don't know what they don't know.

Information cascades explain the pile-on dynamics themselves. Bikhchandani, Hirshleifer, and Welch's 1992 research showed that when people observe others' actions, they rationally decide to follow suit, ignoring their own private information—creating fragile consensus based on very little evidence. LinkedIn's visible engagement metrics function as cascade triggers: posts that gain early traction accumulate further engagement regardless of quality. This is why dozens of people write essentially identical "authenticity matters" posts about the burger video—they're not independently analyzing an event; they're joining a cascade.

The most confident, prolific commentators on any trending topic are often the least qualified. The meta-cognitive deficit ensures a steady supply of authoritative-sounding takes from people who don't know what they don't know.

The landmark Vosoughi, Roy, and Aral study in Science (2018) analyzed 126,000 stories shared by 3 million people and found that falsehood diffuses significantly farther, faster, deeper, and more broadly than the truth. The mechanism is novelty: false or oversimplified narratives are more surprising and emotionally engaging. On LinkedIn, this manifests as reductive hot takes outperforming nuanced analysis. The speed-accuracy tradeoff—one of cognitive science's most robust findings—confirms that faster decisions reliably correlate with less accurate decisions. The economic incentive to post first, not best, systematically degrades discourse quality.

Finally, parasocial relationships distort credibility evaluation. Research on parasocial interactions shows that followers assess influencers' credibility based on emotional attachment rather than demonstrated expertise. On LinkedIn, frequent posting builds familiarity, familiarity builds perceived authority, and perceived authority substitutes for actual competence. The LinkedIn "thought leader" who posts daily about everything from geopolitics to burger marketing doesn't need to be right—they just need to be recognizable.

The irony of the Kempczinski burger moment is that the LinkedIn response perfectly demonstrated the very thing it claimed to diagnose. Hundreds of posts argued that the McDonald's CEO appeared inauthentic. Every one of those posts was itself a performance—a carefully constructed piece of personal branding disguised as strategic analysis, optimized for algorithmic distribution, posted not because the author had genuine insight but because a trending topic presented a content opportunity.

I've spent fifteen years in purpose-driven marketing. I've worked with organizations where the stakes of getting a message right are measured in lives changed, not impressions served. And what I see on LinkedIn after moments like these is the opposite of expertise. It's the performance of expertise—a simulation of insight that substitutes speed for depth, template for thought, and engagement metrics for actual contribution to professional discourse.

The structural incentives are unlikely to change. LinkedIn's revenue hit $17.8 billion in fiscal 2025, up 9% year-over-year. The platform crossed $5 billion quarterly for the first time. Premium subscribers grew to 175 million. LinkedIn launched a $25 million Creator Accelerator and introduced Creator Mode for over 16 million users. The cringe economy is, by every financial metric, working exactly as intended. As Trung Phan noted, the platform is essentially "cringe-proof"—because its real product is talent solutions and advertising, not feed quality, LinkedIn has no financial incentive to curb the performative content that fills it.

The next viral business moment—whatever it is—will produce the same response. Within hours, LinkedIn will be flooded with posts explaining what it "really means" for leadership, branding, and authenticity. They will all say roughly the same thing. They will all be formatted identically. And they will all miss the point that the most revealing thing about any viral business moment isn't the moment itself—it's the speed and uniformity with which an entire platform of self-described thought leaders rushes to convert someone else's story into their own content.

The burger was fine. The takes were the real product nobody asked for.

The most revealing thing about any viral business moment isn't the moment itself—it's the speed and uniformity with which an entire platform rushes to convert someone else's story into their own content.