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Comment by jameslk | Hacker News Reader

Lots of angry sentiment towards this company here. I understand it doesn't necessarily bring this demographic as much value since most here are probably happily employed and don't need it. There's plenty of others who count on a service like LinkedIn, which doesn't have a good comparison (e.g. Twitter to Facebook).

Personally, I've found value in it from the potential clients I've received (I'm a contractor) and the ability to look up just about anyone I may need to do business with. I use it professionally to get an overview of others like I use Wikipedia to get an overview of a topic.

I do know they have room to improve. I've been using the service since 2006 and have seen all manner of their silly practices. But as a well-known, professional network with a large userbase, I have yet to find a rivaling alternative.

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The angry sentiment isn't because people don't see potential value. It's because they do see the value - and how the company keeps spoiling what could be a good user experience.

I agree with this. I have received a ton of value from linkedin, but the UX - particularly on mobile (including their crappy apps) is frustrating.

Would the situation have turned out differently if users gave LinkedIn money in recognition of the referrals LinkedIn facilitated?

People like to hate linkedIn for being exploitative, while happily advancing their careers/businesses without paying LinkedIn for building the network infrastructure.

My speculation is that without any comparable competitors, there's nothing to force LinkedIn to change the negative aspects of their service. If there were two competing services, we would see users gravitating towards the service they prefer and the other service desperately trying to correct itself. For example, when Yahoo introduced suggested searches, Google noticed and picked up the feature too. Alternatively, when IE6 was king, they let it stagnate and look at what happened.

So from that standpoint, I hope that LinkedIn doesn't fail, but rather a competing service nurtures an environment where LinkedIn has to compete. Then hopefully we can see improvements towards what users really want.

The reason a LinkedIn competitor hasn't emerged is the same reason a viable Facebook competitor hasn't emerged: at this point the network effects are too strong, and it's extremely difficult to beat incumbents because of that.

Besides, think about how much flak some HN submissions get for being "just another social network." I think the whole social network market has fully saturated and there will be additional difficulty in convincing people there is room for more social networks (aside from certain niche differentiators such as centralized vs distributed, which 99% of users don't care about).

> The reason a LinkedIn competitor hasn't emerged is the same reason a viable Facebook competitor hasn't emerged: at this point the network effects are too strong, and it's extremely difficult to beat incumbents because of that.

I'd say LinkedIn actually has stronger network effects than Facebook, or other consumer social networks. Consumer social networks are used more casually, so it's easier to get users to sign up than it would be for a professional social network, where users tend to adopt a more conservative mindset. And we've seen several consumer social networks rise in the post-Facebook era - Snapchat, WhatsApp, and Instagram.

The only social network I can reliably guess that someone is on, regardless of job type, is, alas, LinkedIn.

My friend who is a biologist doesn't have a Twitter since nobody in her field uses it, but she has a LinkedIn.

My software developer friends have Twitter, so that's my go-to... but then it's a mishmash of business and personal. Or sometimes only personal, so it feels weird to talk business over it. So then... email, since soft devs - rightfully so - dislike LinkedIn.

I don't know the solution, but it's clear one should be built. Does LinkedIn have an easy "export my social graph" option to at least jump start w competitor?

There's an export contacts feature, which was restored after removing it resulted in a user backlash (http://venturebeat.com/2015/07/25/linkedin-brings-back-tool-...). But if a competitor tried to create a one-click feature for programatically exporting contacts from LinkedIn and importing them into their own database, they would probably get banned. And for the vast majority of users, explaining how to export/import a CSV manually is not viable.

It gets you five columns - name/title/company/email/location.

Unlike the old export feature, it's also frequently missing your latest connections (30-60 days worth, I think).

There are very strong competitors in the German and French speaking worlds.

> There's nothing to force LinkedIn to change the negative aspects of their service

Yeah there is: a $10 billion drop in their stock valuation.

It's unlikely that the drop in the company's value has that much to do with their silly practices.

You said exactly what I had surmised. I don't use LinkedIn, and don't even really get spammed by it...but it's the one service that I don't use that I completely believe has a viable and valuable product. That it is facing such uncertainty is just baffling to me.

Same. LinkedIn has helped me find 2 fantastic jobs now (and leads to many other potential ones). Granted, it was through one recruiter of the many that spammed my inbox. But still, that clutter stays on LinkedIn and I only deal with it when I need it.

In another use case I've also used LinkedIn to find service providers. Instead of relying on word of mouth I can vet someone from their work history, endorsements, and recommendations.

So yeah, they have bad practices, but they're not all bad. I do have to say that what they do provide of value is easily replicable and this is probably a great opportunity for anyone who wants to start something.

I too (as a freelancer) find quite a bit of value out of LinkedIn, but that's orthogonal to the fact that they are a scummy company with even lower ethical standards than Facebook. That they don't have a rivaling alternative to provide competition only adds to the tragedy.

You try their ProFinder yet? I've been messing with it a bit, still too early to make a call on it.

>but as a well-known, professional network with a large userbase, I have yet to find a rivaling alternative.

That's their only advantage, that they are big and almost everyone is already there but it always feels to me like they are some sort of myspace waiting for their a Facebook to come and do it right.

The potential usefulness of LinkedIn only adds to the disappointment and resentment. It is sometimes useful. It could be good. Why does it have to be so intrusive and underhanded that I won't let the app on my phone?

It does have a lot of value. My partner found some awesome contractors by doing searches on LinkedIn for the relevant keywords (it helped that they were unknown technologies with less than a dozen profiles listing them)

LinkedIn lucked out and rode the network effect to its current size. Note that the only thing you like about it is its network effect, which is more a question of timing than open competition at this point.

If other websites like Facebook, Yelp, Google, etc. dumped so much crap on the user while offering so little the internet would be almost unusable. LinkedIn should rot, I'd love to see it, because then everyone would migrate to a better alternative.

This is Stockholm syndrome writ large.

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