LinkedIn’s new UI proves it doesn’t know it’s value to users | Hacker News Reader

LinkedIn’s new UI proves it doesn’t know it’s value to users

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64 pointsNanite42 comments

Linkedin is really terrible.

You are constantly spamed by career 'advices', recruiters, life coaches and people bragging about their work-related achievements... Its really difficult to find any interesting content there. I tend to spend no more than 10 seconds on it, unless I need to respond to a (recruiter) message. Feels like the only people getting anything out of Linkedin are those who are new to their respective fields, and need to network a bit and maybe land a new job. Otherwise, it feels like waste of Internet bandwidth.

Frankly I have such a low opinion about Linkedin, that I'm amazed that nobody came up with an alternative yet. Maybe its the whole 'professional social network' concept that feels weird to me? While I socialize with my colleagues on regular basis, I dont want _work_ to be at the center of my socialization. I prefer to talk to people about other things in their lives.

I have been posting business-related content (curated news about famous entrepreneurs) to LinkedIn for over a year now. At first, I thought it would be a good opportunity because no-one else was curating news in that way. But once the pages got to about 3000 users LinkedIn deleted them all without proper explanation. They deleted my Donald Trump page first (leading me to think they were anti-Trump), and then when I complained they deleted the other six pages I was curating [1]. After a month of discussions, I was able to get the pages back, but the signups had dropped by half. But I persisted, only to have the UI change and for signups to be down 70% from before. Instead of 10,000 followers for Elon Musk news, I should probably have 30,000 if they hadn't meddled with it. Meanwhile, crappy clickbait is shared all around the site. I don't know why I bother to be honest. The site is useless for content creators.

[1]https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/linkedin-deleted-my-donald-tr...

I've been greeted by obvious bugs in their UI too many times to count. Its the only "major" website I've ever come across with amateur mistakes. I can't recall any specifically, but +1 on not spending more than 10 seconds on it. And to be fair, the new UI seems to be cleaner so far.

> I'm amazed that nobody came up with an alternative yet.

Writing a replacement is something I've pondered for several years, but the problem is you need the network effect. It's like starting a dating site (something I did once!) - if people visit and nobody else is there it becomes an empty graveyard of dead dreams.

Sure you don't need to scale to 6 million users immediately, but you need a good way to seed with users, and you need to make it captivating and interesting for those early users.

The other thing you have to consider is that LinkedIn is the master of dark-patterns. To contrast that you'd want to make almost as much as possible open. So export the resumes in JSONResume, or similar open fashion. Of course when you do that you remove a reason for your visitors to stay.

It's not an impossible task, but scaling and growing are hard.. I'm sure if you launched something it'd be popular, but would it be popular _enough_ to be worthwhile, and keep growing? Maybe if you launched on a per-country basis, or some other artificial constraint. (An alternative would be to allow signups to students and record course-histories, etc not just positions. That lets youngsters show their skills despite a lack of job-history.)

I've thought about writing a new Linkedin for years too. It's the curse of the engineer: you use something that sucks and you want to make a better one.

But when thinking about a new Linkedin, I feel like making a new social network with less spam, less clickbait, and a better UI isn't enough to make people switch. What you really need to do is make a strong community centered around a particular industry with serious news, occasional gossip, and heavily moderated comments. In other words for our industry it exists: it's Hacker News.

AngelList is a competitor, at least within our little sphere of the economy.

I'm sorry but the posts' author doesn't know what LinkedIn's value is and neither do most people in this field. Sales and recruiting, functions most engineers avoid. Saying it has only "the foundations" of a lasting business is naive at best. It is wildly dominant in its niche and will remain that way for years and years to come.

META: This blog post is super low effort. Basically just reiterating some really basic UI principles and complaining. I think we can do better on HN

Not everyone knows basic UI principles and definitely not everyone has the skill of applying (and noticing) them. I derive a little educational value out of it.

Although, if I'm honest, my main motivation in reading it is confirmation bias / validating some of my own complaints.

Confusing "it's" with "its" is a good proxy for bad texts as well

> It’s not too late to bring content to users in the way Snapchat has. Because the user’s resume is online, LinkedIn knows far more about them than Snapchat knows about its’ users. I still have hopes that my LinkedIn feed will be full of informative content from credible publications and my network’s opinions on them.

I'm slightly tired of reading think pieces that end with utopian thoughts about what corporations can do with all the data they collect on us.

Not that I really agree with this anyway - my resume and indeed my professional network probably doesn't yield that much insight into the kind of content that will interest me beyond broad brush stroke topics like 'Technology'

Worth pointing out (but not mentioned in the article):

Since switching to a new design, there's actually no way to view anyone's profile without logging in, not the basic info as there used to be, nothing. By following the link to someone else's profile, you're being greeted with the signup/signin page.

So, you can't effectively open anyone's profile without triggering the "who looked at your profile" thingy (other than opening a spare account for that purpose, of course).

Profile viewing options > Private mode will let you do that. You lose your own "who's looked at your profile", but that seems like a fair tradeoff.

Here's the rub though: if you pay for premium you can turn on private mode and still see who's looked at your profile.

This sounds like a fair and valid premium feature?

Instead of using all that resources on a new UI, they should have fixed their jobs search.

I only go to linkedin when I need a job, yet their job search is terrible.

It has no real filtering or sorting. And what it has doesn't really work right. Like, why would you filter by job title, when that varies greatly by company.

I ended up spending most of my time on StackOverflow job board, because the searching and filtering works as expected.

> it doesn't know its value to users

Ask HN: what is LinkedIn's value? I hate almost all forms of social media. What value gave all y'all gained?

It's a professional social network. For example, I just had an acquaintance message me via linkedin, send me their resume which then let me refer them, getting them a job and myself a nice bonus.

Could it have been done via Facebook or email? Maybe, but we're not social friends, so no Facebook connections between us, and we don't know each other's email addresses so they couldn't have discovered me easily.

The semantics of linkedin are what matters. It's not a social network that's highly interactive in the way that email or facebook is, it's more an on-line resume post + people you've worked with that help establish the milieu you live in.

Does linkedin "get" it? I dunno. I suspect that they do, but their growth targets can't accept this, so they keep doing things weirdly.

I get a lot more emails after creating an account. Makes me feel kind of popular I guess.

Linkedin is a lead generation machine. You can outreach pretty much anybody from any industry. People are usually open and as long as you don't spam them, you can start conversation with anybody and showcase your expertise. I have an account for 10 years and only last year I saw the value of it. I used to get a lot of spam and job offers from recruiters, but it has going down. Also, I recommend creating an email just for it because as soon as you add people they can see your email address.

Mostly it's a reverse job-board: "Here are my skills, work history, and list of people you may know that are willing to say that I rock; call me if you want to hire me." The farther along and more successful you are in your career, the better the offers you get are. It has secondary functions like keeping track of people in your network and some social media aspects (that hardly anyone uses) but that's the primary one.

LinkedIn is for professional networking. If Facebook had the equivalent of Google+'s circles to segment your friend list by type, LinkedIn would be unnecessary. But since they don't, LinkedIn keeps me connected to people that I don't want seeing my personal updates and people that I need to contact when looking for work or trying to fill an opening I feel is high quality.

All the posts and reminders are worthless to me and only serve to annoy me. It's the professional graph and messaging that I find valuable.

As a student it helps me research companies by meeting and talking to actual people outside of an office environment. It allows me to ask people for favours which a lot of people are more than happy to do.

Keeping in touch with professionals also helps me keep the slight acquaintance going so that I can hit them up for a favour later.

Also: The new UI freezes up a lot.

And when I try to log in from my linux laptop, it tells me I need a more modern browser (because my Chrome is a single year out of date?).

But it's correct in telling me to use a different browser: LinkedIn (and only LinkedIn) crashes constantly otherwise.

To be fair, a year is a long time in the life of a browser.

Why do you use a year old version of Chrome? You're just exposing yourself to dozens of public vulnerabilities.

Laziness. Although your comment will probably guilt me into finally doing an update.

So, I think I owe you a "thanks"?

You really should keep your browser updated.

I didn't know you could even use an out-of-date Chrome. I've been using it from a long time (soon after it was created), and IIRC, at some point, didn't they make updates automatic and mandatory? Or is there some setting in Chrome to toggle that? Haven't checked recently.

Update: Just now went to Chrome Settings and looked. Didn't see a toggle like that. And when I clicked on the About link, it 'checking for updates' and then 'updating Google Chrome'.

I thought it probably auto-updated in Linux (Mint) as it seems to on the rest of my devices. But I looked at my version, and checked Wikipedia and saw it was from a year ago.

hordes of hackers discover they are running a vulnerable browser :D

Thanks for the info. I was talking about using it on Windows. Been using Firefox on Linux.

Since LinkedIn changed the UI, signups to my Showcase pages that are newsfeeds about famous entrepreneurs [1] have dropped by over 70%, making the work involved in curation almost worthless. If they are trying to make a social network that allows people to share business-related content they are failing badly.

[1]https://www.linkedin.com/company/elon-musk-newslines

LinkedIn changed the backend in 2012 from Rails to Node.js: http://highscalability.com/blog/2012/10/4/linkedin-moved-fro...

Are there any more recent write ups what LinkedIn uses on Frontend on Backend at the moment?

Frontend, I believe they use Ember now.

New UI REMOVED notes you make against contacts (this is how I remembered who the people I connected with were!)

This totally undermines the value of the network! The redesign may help them make more money short term, but will undermine the business long term!

Wow, I didn't even realize this until now... Filthy. I had a lot of notes in there... just deleted I guess?

Not much of a LinkedIn user but I've noticed that they are trying to hide the slow load times with placeholders. Let's just say it's noticeably slow.

What I see when I look at LinkedIn is a company that has too many teams and not enough communication. "We're in charge of the side bar... but we don't talk to the people who are in charge of the profile... or the people in charge of the feed..." They need better unification on the product team.

They don't use anywhere near the full screen on desktop / laptop, it's some sort of crappy non-responsive tiny little center column for content.

SO much sponsored content with the new UI. Between through "stuff you may like" and jobs and "people you may know" and just ads... and then you finally see what your friends posted. Of the top 10 posts in my feed, 7 of them were ads. Even when you hit "hide stories like this" on the sponsored crap, they come back again. If I'm not looking for a job, why do I have to see the jobs?

* http://imgur.com/SVOlvWW

Page load times are SOO long. 4.5 seconds to load a profile page that doesn't even have never-ending scroll? I'm using Google Fiber 1000.

* http://imgur.com/PvwNAbT

It's just ugly a lot of spacing just seems off. Colors seem off... like they don't have a style guide. "Let's slop in some yellowish there, that'll be fine..."

* http://imgur.com/9CPsYSi

* http://imgur.com/Hg4lexp

We lost functionality... ability to see profiles, ability to print your profile to a PDF and see endorsements / recommendations. Now all you see is where you worked.

* http://imgur.com/ySwydsy

UX seems like it's some totally compromised middled ground between junky non-responsive and where it wants to be in 5 years... it is just not very good at all right now.

EDIT: A few more...

A least they don't have 4 different main navigation bars within 1 click inside of the main navigation away from each other... oh wait... http://imgur.com/BAfojwJ

At least they don't add frivolous scroll bars to their menus... oh wait... http://imgur.com/iKiIkuF

At least their main navigation controls are consistent throughout... oh wait... http://imgur.com/rwffoqT

I keep getting recommended somebody who is the 4xBikini champion. Why?!

"its"

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