The troll button and your LinkedIn strategy

Seth Godin published a short piece recently about the troll button: a mythical platform feature that would let users opt out of algorithmically-amplified nonsense. His argument is clean: social media platforms profit from troll behavior, and until we change the incentives, the behavior compounds. We think he's right about the incentive structure. We also think founders building inbound pipeline on LinkedIn have already internalized the lesson.

Why the attention economy argument matters for B2B founders

The posts that get the most raw engagement on LinkedIn are often the ones that provoke the easiest reaction: the hot take on remote work, the "unpopular opinion" that isn't, the fabricated journey narrative with a cliffhanger. These posts get hundreds of comments. Most of those comments are from people who will never buy anything from the poster.

For founders at Series A or beyond, or senior leaders at B2B services businesses, this creates a real strategic question: what does commenting on a 400-comment post actually do for your pipeline?

The answer, in most cases, is nothing. Your comment gets buried. The audience reading that post is wide and shallow. The person posting it is optimizing for reach, not for a room of buyers.

The troll button you already have

Godin's proposed troll button is a platform feature that hasn't been built. But the functional equivalent already exists for anyone building B2B pipeline on LinkedIn: you can choose, right now, which posts you engage with and which you scroll past.

This sounds obvious. It isn't in practice, because the scroll itself is the trap. When you open LinkedIn and start scrolling, the algorithm serves you a feed optimized for your time on the platform, not for your business goals. Posts with high velocity get surfaced. Posts from people with large follower counts get surfaced. Posts that prompted controversy get surfaced. Very few of these are the posts where your actual buyer is sitting in the comment section, reading replies carefully.

We've looked at this pattern across profiles we audit at Chime. The founders who generate consistent inbound from LinkedIn engagement are not the ones who comment the most -- they're the ones who comment in the right places. The right places share a few characteristics: the post author has an audience that overlaps meaningfully with the commenter's buyer profile, the post is early enough that a good comment has visibility, and the conversation in the comments is substantive rather than performative.

That last point maps most directly to Godin's argument. When a post's comment section is full of "+1", "great post!", and one-line agreements, the quality of attention in that section is low. The people who read that thread are skimming, not evaluating. A sharp comment in a low-quality thread is still a low-quality audience interaction.

Contrast that with a post that has 20 comments and a real back-and-forth. The people reading that thread are engaged. They're the ones who will click through to your profile, remember your name, or send you a connection request.

What Godin gets right about incentive structure

Godin's argument is that we reward troll behavior by engaging with it, and that rewarding it perpetuates it. "We get the culture we reward."

The same logic applies inside your LinkedIn strategy. If you spend your engagement time in the highest-volume comment sections -- because that's what the algorithm surfaces and because big numbers feel like big reach -- you are rewarding that type of content with your attention and your effort. You're also competing against 300 other people for a few seconds of a reader's attention.

The founders who are building real pipeline through LinkedIn engagement have, consciously or not, pressed their own troll button. They've opted out of the high-volume, low-signal comment sections and opted into a smaller set of posts where the audience is right, the timing is early, and the conversation is worth having.

This is a different frame than "engage with influencers in your niche." That advice is directionally correct but too vague to act on. The specific version is: find the 10 to 15 people whose audience is your buyer, watch for their posts within the first two hours of publication, and write a reply that adds something the original post didn't say. Do that consistently and the people who matter start to recognize your name.

We've written about the mechanics of how top creators on LinkedIn structure their content and why early engagement matters for distribution in our breakdown of LinkedIn's top creator patterns. The short version: the algorithm's early signal window is narrow, and showing up in that window in a comment section your buyer inhabits is worth more than showing up late in a comment section that's already noise.

The compounding problem and the compounding solution

Godin notes that trolling compounds: trolls have to out-troll each other to keep the attention coming. The same dynamic plays out in the non-troll version of LinkedIn attention-seeking. Founders who optimize for raw comment count find themselves needing to post more provocative takes to maintain their numbers. The content drifts toward what gets reactions, not what gets buyers.

The compounding works the other way too. Founders who consistently show up in the right comment sections, with the right perspective, accumulate recognition with a specific audience. That recognition is slow to build and slow to decay. 90 days of showing up in the right comment sections builds recognition a competitor can't replicate quickly.

Ruben Hassid's LinkedIn strategy and Dan Martell's approach both demonstrate this in different ways. Neither is defined by high-frequency posting into the void. Both are built on consistent presence in specific, well-chosen conversations.

The practical version of pressing the button

Godin's troll button is a filter. Yours is a list.

The founders who do this well maintain a short list of 10 to 20 LinkedIn accounts whose audience overlaps with their buyer. They check those accounts' recent posts each morning, identify the ones that are fresh and have space for a meaningful comment, and write something worth reading. The scroll is mostly eliminated. The algorithm's incentive structure becomes largely irrelevant because they're not letting the algorithm choose which conversations they join.

This is what "10 minutes a day on LinkedIn" actually looks like when it's working. Not scrolling, not reacting, not chasing whatever is trending in the feed. A small, curated set of conversations with a specific audience, entered early, with a perspective worth having.

The troll button Godin wants would change the default for everyone. You don't have to wait for it. Change the default yourself.