How academics use LinkedIn and Substack to extract your knowledge and keep the credit
Crowdsourcing knowledge without compensation
I began a rant on Notes that became too long that I decided that this needed its own post. My rant was inspired by a few posts by academics on LinkedIn and Substack talking about their work and appealing to their parasocial community. I’m not seeing anything new in these posts, just a recurring pattern that sets my cult leader radar hackles up.
It’s that time again when academics and academically affiliated professionals are looking to grow their visibility beyond the ivory tower through social media platforms. I’m speaking specifically about LinkedIn and Substack, which are treated as legitimate extensions of academic and therapeutic authority and attract professionals who want to build their platform, social protection, and status so their name carries significance beyond the halls of academia.
The pattern is knowledge vampirism.
Knowledge vampirism involves the extraction of other people’s insight, experience, and thinking while retaining authorship, legitimacy, and benefit, usually under the language of contribution, collaboration, or service.
This pattern is covert narcissism in action. Covert narcissism, as the term implies, isn’t passive or benign. It’s a control strategy that secures dominance while concealing power behind likability, reasonableness, and apparent humility. The knowledge vampire presents themselves as calm, reasonable, helpful, and safe, so that entitlement and expectation are experienced as cooperation rather than demand.
This pattern works because it exploits trust that’s already extended to academic authority.
This is visible in therapeutic spaces, particularly in how client material is reused.
Therapists publish content derived from direct experiences with clients. Names are changed and details are altered, but the substance comes from the session. The therapist remains positioned as the expert while using material generated by the client to produce public teaching, writing, or paid content. The client paid for the session, and the therapist then profits again from the same material.
This practice is ethically questionable. These therapists rarely tell clients exactly how their material will be used, how it might generate income or status, or what protections exist once their material goes public. Even when permission is technically obtained, consent is shaped by gratitude, dependence, and the client’s desire to support someone who helped them, despite already paying for a service. Therapists don’t offer meaningful compensation, and they treat the client’s contribution as incidental rather than essential.
If a therapist intends to use learning from sessions in a public forum, that intention must be explicit. Therapists can speak about themes, patterns, and processes without lifting dialogue or narrative. However, when public content depends on what clients bring into the room, the client is now doing labour that should be compensated, not appropriated.
Academics engage in the same behaviour under the banner of collaboration. In practice, this often looks like asking a colleague, supervisee, or peer to think something through, then using that analysis in one’s own work without attribution. A question is asked, an answer is given, and the knowledge is treated as if it belongs to the person who asked.
I developed the concept of knowledge vampirism1 to describe this exact pattern of extraction. The knowledge vampire embodies covert narcissistic traits and targets people who are generous, thoughtful, and willing to share insight drawn from their own experience. Academics are especially protected in this dynamic because they’re perceived as public-minded researchers improving society, while operating inside a competitive system that rewards visibility, funding, and institutional favour. When legitimacy and survival depend on continued status, everyone involved can bend ethical boundaries without penalty, and knowledge vampires receive institutional benefits instead of the source.
Speak to any academic who has left academia and they will describe the mafia-like reality of being inside once Golden Child status is lost.
This is why academics work to preserve Golden Child status. It benefits the institution and it benefits them. Those benefits are then rhetorically passed on to the public under the promise of improvement, even as academics know that speaking about problems truthfully can cost them funding, promotions, contracts, speaking invitations, or institutional protection. These risks determine what can be said, how its said, and what must remain unspoken.
So here’s where the imbalance becomes obvious. Academics will tell you all the things you want to hear about how their work is going to improve your life, so you’ll be grateful enough to want to help them help you. Except they need you more than you need them.
What you contribute in the name of creating free tools or resources are the tools themselves. You’re giving them what you already use, think with, and rely on, but without authorship, attribution, or compensation. You’re handing over something they need for free.
I can hear some people saying “but knowledge is free.”
It isn’t.
If knowledge were free, universities would not charge tuition, researchers would not compete for grants, therapists would not bill for sessions, and publishers would not gate content. Knowledge embeds thinking processes, logic, experience, and expertise developed through analysis, questioning, and reflection. It’s the product of work that transforms information into something usable. That work is compensated everywhere except where people are persuaded to give it away.
The claim that knowledge becomes free when it is extracted from others rather than produced directly is a convenient asymmetry that legitimises exploitation.
The same standard applies to academics. When academics conduct research that requires input from the public, they are required to submit an ethics application before the study can proceed. That application specifies how knowledge will be sourced, how participants will be informed, and how their contribution will be compensated. Participants are asked to consent with clear information about how their input will be used and who will benefit.
That requirement exists because knowledge is not free. Universities and researchers benefit from the findings, while it is often unclear whether the published work, if it even reaches publication, will benefit the public it claims to serve.
This is the ethical boundary that gets crossed on social media.
Why crowdsourcing online bypasses research ethics
In formal research settings, public input triggers ethics requirements because it produces value. That value accrues to the researcher and the institution through status, which is why reciprocity is required.
Crowdsourcing on social media bypasses this entire structure while retaining the same downstream benefits. Platforms function as a substitute for ethics approval, and engagement becomes a substitute for consent. Contributors are not told how their input will be analysed, stored, synthesised, or attributed. They aren’t offered authorship options, compensation pathways, or meaningful withdrawal rights. Their participation is framed as voluntary generosity rather than labour, even though the researcher could not produce the work without it.
The claim that contributors are compensated through access to “free tools” doesn’t hold up to scrutiny. In these arrangements, contributors are the producers of the tools, not their recipients. Their experiences, language, distinctions, and practical strategies form the substance of the work, while the researcher supplies naming, packaging, and institutional legitimacy. That legitimacy becomes linked to the researcher’s name, not to the people whose thinking, often shaped by painful experience, made that work and those tools possible.
A researcher who is genuinely extending knowledge does so by pushing beyond the limits of their own academic paradigm that I described here, not by recycling and repackaging insight extracted from willing and often naïve contributors under the guise of participation.
Free knowledge and the justification of knowledge vampirism
Here’s a scenario I’ve come across countless times on LinkedIn. The tactics are not meaningfully different from how cult figures and their inner circles draw people in, secure loyalty, and gradually narrow who belongs, who matters, and who is positioned as essential while maintaining the illusion of choice.
A credentialed academic with institutional affiliation posts yet another victim–hero narrative about the dark triad leader and the enlightened system that will finally stop them. The content is familiar but what’s different is the hook and who’s being singled out — or chosen.
Here is an outline of an academic or academically-affiliated knowledge vampire:
Positions their research as collaborative, treating the platform as an informal research environment.
This creates the appearance of shared purpose while control over direction, framing, and ownership remains unilateral. Calling the platform a research space lends legitimacy without activating research ethics, gaslighting contributors into experiencing themselves as collaborators rather than unpaid inputs. Participation is narrowed to those who are seen as insightful, thoughtful, or aligned, introducing an early sense of exclusivity under the language of collegiality.
Presents themselves as the source of results while offering to produce free resources for the audience.
Claiming ownership over the results allows the academic to establish themselves as the dominant authority from the outset. By simultaneously offering free resources, they present themselves as generous and indispensable. They imply that the audience’s existing knowledge is incomplete or unusable without their intervention, positioning themselves as the necessary translator who can make that knowledge authoritative. This move casts the academic as the saviour and the audience as dependent, while authority remains entirely with the person already holding institutional legitimacy.
Expresses gratitude for audience engagement, personal disclosures, and shared experiences.
The academic repeatedly thanks the audience for their engagement, disclosures, and willingness to share. Once people are thanked for what they have already given, stopping feels awkward or disloyal. By calling lived experience engagement or stories, the academic lightens the language and disguises the reality that people are offering insight, pattern recognition, and understanding built through experience. What’s being taken is intellectual and emotional labour, with attention functioning as a selective reward. Gratitude simply reframes it as generosity freely given, making ongoing extraction easier to sustain.
Frames their engagement as a form of help that goes beyond information-sharing.
The academic deliberately shifts the language from information sharing to help. Intellectual contribution is recast as a response to need rather than as analysis or expertise. This move gaslights contributors about what is actually happening, encouraging them to interpret their participation as empathy or usefulness rather than as the provision of knowledge. Participation, once casual or optional, is now construed as a response to something important and urgent. Once help is invoked, the emotionally captured participant perceives a gentle pressure to continue engaging in order to uphold a self-image of benevolence. Empathy and the need to feel useful are pulled into the interaction, converting voluntary contribution into a sense of obligation that makes extraction possible.
Thank you for reading this far. You can see why my rant needed its own post.
My aim is to make these dynamics visible so people can spot them and avoid getting drawn into them.
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