Does anyone here have any thoughts on this that they would care to share?
Now that everyone has signed up just spam them with job adverts, charge recruiters for the spam, and make tons of money from effectively legalised spamming.
That's more or less LinkedIn's entire business model. The real trick is setting it up to avoid violating the "Can Spam Act," but still make it needlessly difficult to unsubscribe or close the account.
Would spam reduction tactics, both from the company itself as well as from members/bots, be one of the key differentiators?
I would like to believe that it would be possible to be successful in this market without spamming your users.
I closed my LinkedIn account because of the spam and dishonest tactics. I want to feel like the companies I work with want everyone to "win" not only them (i.e. their users derive value also).
The bots are problematic, but unfortunately some of it is humans acting bot-like, meaning recruiters pasting in generic messages, so even captchas might be ineffective.
But anything a LinkedIn competitor could do to drop the spam, contact harvesting, and bots would be a massive perk over LinkedIn actual.
One thing that Xing does differently is that you cannot prevent other people to see when you visit their profile, not even as a paying customer. On the other hand you can only partially see who visits you if use the free plan. This gives the whole thing a different dynamic. People often sign up for a payed plan because they are curious to know who visited them.
EDIT: Wow, their first release on iOS was back in 2009!
I accepted invitations from those who seems like were playing the game of some trying to get as many connections as possible. My once valuable LinkedIn Rolodex has degraded because I don't recognize most of my connections. I was getting endorsements from people I haven't known since I was a kid. They clearly aren't qualified to endorse me. And as mentioned, spam begets spam when it comes to recruiting. Recruiters take a machine gun approach to reaching out to candidates. Candidates understandably start ignoring those inmails. The recruiters then increase the # of people they reach out to, which then alienates more candidates.
We (Step.com) are trying to take an approach where we crowdsource a professional's market value from companies while the professional isn't looking at a job. It's completely anonymous. And as the professional is getting valuable market data from the marketplace personalized to them, they are in effect building a little black book of companies that are interested in them. So once a professional does start looking, they have a starting point.
I don't know if our approach is the answer (i hope it is) but I do think the next model needs to deliver high value content and protect professionals from the low value content and contact.
LinkedIn is fantastic at being LinkedIn.
The only way to bring them down would be to approach a part of the problem they solve in a completely different way and in a compelling enough way that would make a piece of LinkedIn irrelevant.
You can only compete by making LinkedIn irrelevant, not by building a better LinkedIn.
If Github offered better community discussion features and a professional portfolio/resume product for developers, then Github could become more relevant than LinkedIn for the developer community.
If Dribbble doubled down on those types of things too, then Dribbble could be more relevant than LinkedIn in the Design community.
etc, etc. and it's possible that people have various skillsets for which they have various types of professional personas. There's a lot of angles here, and it's not like they're not being explored, but these things take a long time. It's easy to forget.
One that doesn't spam me. One that doesn't encourage others to spam me.
Xing looks nice, but it is very focused on Germany and german-speaking countries in Europe. But they are kind enough to have a landing page in English -- well-written, English, too. I'd almost use them for that reason alone, even though I don't speak German and I'm not in Europe.
I can't tell anything about step.com, which seems to be in beta and focused on NYC.
Surely the YC/HN crowd can come up with something good, right?
The dark patterns employed by LinkedIn in order have left a bad impression with say half of the people I know. Even the gray patterns are awkward--for example when it suggests I know other people at my organization simply because we coincidentally have the same last name.