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Comment by anilgulecha | Hacker News Reader

Here's a question to HN: if we were to design an alternative to linkedin (for IT/technical folks), what would be the features you'd want?

I'll start: 1) The ability to go no-opportunities. When you're not looking for work, you turn this on, and you will not turn up on any search result. 2) Simple export API, with a guarantee of you having complete say over your data. You may export as a json anytime, and import into another service. 3) Non-profit is possible. A resume directory can be run by a few people with a small revenue. Trying to make a unicorn is what leads to linked-in level shit.

Others?

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Not doing 'creepy' things with your data (http://www.interactually.com/linkedin-creepiest-social-netwo...)

It's hard to convert this to technical requirement -- this is largely a moral requirement on someone running the service. That's the second best option -- first would be this being technicall not possible.

The only way I can think of to deter this is cost per action. So accounts start with some virtual (or real) currency which spends on actions like connecting or adding to the graph. This will at-least minimize if not stop the behavior.

Any other ways of implementing non-creepiness?

I don't think a basic social network starts out creepy, and quite a lot of effort goes in to implementing the features that enable it to become creepy. Non-creepiness is not a requirement, it is a constraint, such as 'no retroactive default boundary-weakening' and 'do not send email that dishonestly misrepresents the intentions and views of your members, and particularly not of specific members by name.' It is not that hard.

> It's hard to convert this to technical requirement -- this is largely a moral requirement on someone running the service. That's the second best option -- first would be this being technicall not possible.

It's hard to imagine this idea getting traction, but one way to implement this would be to require new features to be approved by (say) a majority of active users. This could act as a brake on roll-out of creepy features (if people read before approving …), but it might also slow or retard genuine advancements (although "no to constant interface re-design" is a feature in my book).

This entire notion of a professional social network I believe is flawed in that it is built upon the notion that it would be better to hire someone who has a smaller degree of separation from you, which makes no sense. I do a fair amount of interviewing of programmers, and not a single person I work with could give a damn about anyone's linkedin profile; it's meaningless. I just find the whole idea to be very shallow, vein, and obtrusive.

Should it instead be only a directory of people currently looking for opportunities. People who find work, take themselves off the directory, and people who want work add themselves in?

I think you'll end up with primarily new grads in the site with this policy.

If you're employed and discreetly looking for new work and you 'activate' your profile, now everyone in the office knows you're looking to switch jobs.

Yep, turn on your "I'm looking" flag, or even go and spruce up your profile and you're outed.

has anyone yet found a job on linkedin by flipping some flag? just curious. my experience is that linkedin is a source of spam targets for agencies, but i haven't heard of a single case when people were found/contacted by potential employer directly.

Linkedin profiles are one way for you to get feedback from people that actually worked with someone.

You might find the guy who seemed awkward and nervous in the interview was always very helpful to the rest of his teammates. You might learn that the guy who seemed to know your entire tech stack is actually notoriously slow in delivering working code.

Don't.

The target group of LinkedIn is mid-level managers of any kind plus the people who want to join that group. Individual contributors such as programmers will not get any value of such a network - no job to be done.

GitHub is way better suited, but won't capture the purely professional programmer who never works on public stuff.

Leaves StackOverflow, maybe expand the user profiles into a full profile (maybe already done, not using SO myself as I am said mid-level mgr).

Basically - you need a hook. Something useful on top of the networking aspect to attract ICs.

Career-focused people are on LI and use it, no matter what. Very hard to beat them by now, similar issue with FB - to compete you'd need at least equivalent data. And yes, LI built their dataset with very slimey tactics.

I think I'd prefer a very generic connection network.

Simply, a directory of connections where I can define my relationship with another individual. Something that people won't hesitate to connect on after even a brief meeting. Additionally, I want to control individually what contact information they have access to.

There might be some room to tailor it with options which control the visibility of that connection by your other connections. (e.g. I don't want to show that I'm closely connected with Bill Gates. But I will let people see I'm connected with Arnold Schwarzenegger and I feel comfortable offering introductions)

You're describing G+

>if we were to design an alternative to linkedin (for IT/technical folks), what would be the features you'd want?

The ability to confidently wipe all data you've ever fracked from me as part of deleting the account if/when I chose to leave your service.

Please plan the delete operations as a core part of your architecture, rather than an addon you can't properly support because you didn't think about deleting data when you designed the system.

Well, whatever we build is archive-able at anytime, so it's hard to technically disallow backup of data if Eve is bent on spidering all of the data.

Instead how about no contact-data (email/phone) be made publically available at all. And all friends request, messages or recruiter contacts goto a public box for that contact? So we can recycle old PO boxes after set intervals, and you only listen to the latest one. Anyone trying to reach you has to be OKed by you.

There's also another negative PO, and you try to keep that empty. Bad player that spam you get a a megative PO message, and those that get too many such are lowered on some scale.

Or of course, charge per action, so it'll be cheaper for someone to contact a dozen people, but too expensive to mass spam.

>Anyone trying to reach you has to be OKed by you.

It's got nothing to do with other people. When your company goes under, and historically speaking most do, someone will buy your DB. With all your debts, you won't be in a position to refuse. Who will the buyer be? What countries laws will they operate under? Will /they/ be willing to protect my contact data? Or will they sell it to telemarketers for a quick buck?

Sorry, but if you can't find a way to let me wipe my data, even if it takes 6 months while your backups cycle, I'm not interested and never will be.

Oh, I'm with you on data-wiping. I'm just trying to think of a solution that does not involve you trusting me to wipe your data.

LinkedIn is ostensibly about "business networking" as well as job hunting/offering. If I wanted to join your suggested service, I might not be looking for work, but I might want to get an introduction to an interesting colleague through friend-of-a-friend style introductions.

Perhaps that could be added to your wish list, again as opt-in/-out functionality.

Generally I'd be reluctant to trust any free service in exchange for my data. LinkedIn is even worse than that because even I pay they constantly overstep and gradually tear down any external APIs (until total user lock-in which is the current state of affair). I can no longer export my own connections, ... or query the interface for basic BI (e.g. which companies in Paris are working on BigData technologies etc).

Further there is a huge problem with companies being shit when it comes to providing feedback to candidates (which to be fair this problem LinkedIn never offered to solve). An issue that Glassdoor initially because they positioned themselves as some kind of review platform. But unfortunately glassdoor did a u-turn and now copy/paste LinkedIn's subscription/recruitment model 1:1 and even spams me more often than LinkedIn asking me to buy their job-posting packages.

The problem is that there is no way of holding companies accountable to their recruitment practices. If you apply for a job you have no idea why you get no feedback or what happened with your data that you supplied. How many other applicants have also never heard again or been left waiting for 3 months without an answer from the company. One of my companies is in recruitment so I know a thing or 2 about how recruiters often are stuck in the middle if the client doesn't provide proper feedback of why a candidate gets rejected.

Pushing for transparency here would be a killer service. Though I'm totally disillusioned with another walled garden where I have to take some founders word for it. I want to see something anonymous that does not put the candidate at risk if they give bad feedback about an employer. Also it should be decentralized and without a possibility to be killed (e.g. no censorship or EU data protection law or "right to be forgotten" should allow an employer to remove a bad review/comment from the web). I think the blockchain would lend itself to such a concept.

Blockchain would also help with the issue in the sibling comment worried about creepiness, where I suggested that actions be paid for.

Is it possible for the value of a node in a blockchain to grow with time, and cardinality. Because that would be killer. No one may create spam nodes, and a pgp like trust develops over time.

You can't delete information from blockchains, which makes them problematic from a data protection or simple error point of view.

> 1)

Linked-in actually has this but I still get messages from recruiters. I'm not sure if the Linked-in flag affects search results but I can think of ways to circumvent "search ghosting." For example, I could be found without search by looking at the company profile or the connections of people in my company.

I'm sure there are ways to fix this but the only one I can think of involves penalizing the recruiter and at the end of the day these people are just trying to do their job.

LinkedIn formerly had a very handy link to export the contact details in vCard format. This allowed me to easily add those details to my personal address book, which I carefully curate. They removed this presumably to keep one in the walled garden of using LinkedIn as the address book.

This page? https://www.linkedin.com/people/export-settings

No, that exports the whole address book. LinkedIn formerly had a link on each contact page that allowed you to download the vCard for that person. This was handy when trying to ensure you have the latest information for a particular person. If I use the export page you pointed to, I'd have to resolve conflicts for every entry at once.

I've got much better opportunities through here and StackOverflow.

for 1) you generally don't want to advertise that you are looking for work while still employed. Showing-up in results is the equivalent of painting a target on your back.

multiple professions.

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