“I Just Stumbled Across Your Profile and Thought We Should Connect”

Uphoff on Media Podcast · Jun 24, 2026 · 10m

Something has gone wrong with digital networking.

It was already broken in 2020. I wrote about it then and the response was significant. Thousands of people read it, shared it, and the engagement was immediate. Hundreds responded with their own stories. Worst LinkedIn outreach messages. Cringe-worthy cold emails. Tales of digital networking gone horribly wrong.

Six years later, the problem hasn’t been solved. It’s been industrialized.

The clumsy, tone-deaf outreach messages that were already flooding LinkedIn and email in 2020 are now being generated, personalized, and sent at machine scale…