Ask HN: Do people want a LinkedIn alternative? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Do people want a LinkedIn alternative?

35 pointsdodoso79 comments

I was wondering if the HN community wants a LinkedIn alternative. I hear many people complaining that it has become a place for humble bragger. If you were to replace LinkedIn, what would you want it to be? What to emphasize more or less on?

Update: I am thinking of building a LinkedIn alternative. Could you please kindly drop your email here (https://forms.gle/RT6pmzEqpxPccG5q7) so I can reach out to you? I need validation from people that want a better LinkedIn.

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All I want from the "new improved LinkedIn" is a way to maintain my network of past co-workers and people I have dealt with in a professional capacity and stay in touch. I'm delighted to read about job changes, promotions and any work related awards, accomplishments, links to published articles.

I DO NOT WANT:

Randoms contacting me to add to their network. i.e. people I've never met, nor worked with.

Recruiters spamming me with jobs that I am NOT interested in. Recruiters asking to be added to their network (see previous point).

Invitations to seminars, conferences, etc that have nothing to do with my profession.

"LinkedIn" staff wanting me to sign up and pay for yet another feature that I don't need.

As others have mentioned, no personal updates, humble brags, etc.

This is likely why LinkedIn is so non-focused on one workflow. Everyone wants something different.

In my case, I don't want to hear anything about what people are up to. I don't want articles, or other such stuff. I don't want to be messaged.

For me, I just want a work history validation mechanism, and a way for legit job offers to appear.

The perfect linkedin for me, would be a way to link to work contacts without ever talking to them. Once linked (eg, when people allow it), I could get contact info if a person has it setup. That is, an email address or similar.

Again, the platform would have zero communication on it, so if you want to talk, then take that email, and email the person!

Outside of that, I want nothing. No communication, news, etc.

This sounds amazing.

Those are people-problems, not platform-problems. A NewLinkedIn will converge to the state of the current LinkedIn as it grows over time.

For me, I can get all I want from LinkedIn (recruiter messages, contact lists, search for people/companies) and remove everything else from sight just by adding a few rules on uBlock Origin and making sure communication preferences are set to only incoming messages and nothing else. I don't see any feeds, I don't get engagement emails, and I don't have the app on phone.

I set communication settings to let only people who know me (ie are in my contact list) to contact me (Settings -> Communications -> Who can reach you). The contact list is culled mercilessly once a year (eg. recruiters who specialize in jobs no longer relevant to me are removed). The Email settings in the Communications section are also quite detailed and there are a bunch of preferences you can choose from; I don't get any emails from Linkedin except inmails.

LinkedIn is my only social network (HN doesn't count IMO), and unfortunately I can't get rid of it without impacting my career, so I have incentive to bend it to my requirements. It thankfully isn't too difficult.

Another charming linkedIn feature: Did you say you wanted no mails from us? Well we're sure that was just a temporary thing, surely you don't mean that NOW, so we've re-enabled daily digests for you!

Yup. I get dozens of linkedin messages to my spambox every week. I tried turning them off a handful of times but the spam filter works great.

You're getting noticed

>Randoms contacting me to add to their network. i.e. people I've never met, nor worked with.

But how do you curate this in anything resembling an automated fashion? I suppose you might add a box for the requestor to the effect of "how do you know this person" ... but that's way too easy to game

> All I want from the "new improved LinkedIn" is a way to maintain my network of past co-workers and people I have dealt with in a professional capacity and stay in touch. I'm delighted to read about job changes, promotions and any work related awards, accomplishments, links to published articles.

HEAR HEAR.

I just want to know about what others are up to professionally.

Yep this for me too. One other thing I'd like is to be able to see who the HM is for a role so I can contact directly instead of sending my application to a black hole. I would like to think this has the benefit of filtering out generalized hiring loops.

That’s going to be hard to do. Recruiters will simply post it for HM.

I know and HMs use recruiters as filters which is a total waste of time.

To answer the title: no.

LinkedIn is a perfect containment zone as is. Leave it. Any alternative will die an unused death, or will gather a critical mass of recruiters blindly spamming their jobs/thought influencers shitting out their opinions to as many “connections” as they can.

Any place that tries to target LinkedIn will only replicate its terrible SNR.

I estimate the current SNR is about -200 dB ! And getting worse by the year.

In the very early days, it was probably only about -30 dB or so.

I don't think it is perfect, but I agree that it is good enough

As a freelancer/consultant, I find LinkedIn to be severely lacking. The focus on job titles and roles means that people like me don't get to showcase our skills and capabilities.

Imo, it feels like a solution for the world a decade ago than the world a decade from now. Would love something that focuses more on skills, projects, and capabilities than job titles.

Agreed: it would be great to find suitable freelancers for specific projects based upon skills, experience and value they are willing to delivery.

You can put a showcase of the projects you have worked on and explain what you did/what your responsibilities were

Have you upgraded to Showcase / LI for Creators - https://www.linkedin.com/showcase/li4c/ ?

I haven't put the effort into it yet, but occasionally bump into a profile that has upgraded - it took a few views to understand, but now I can see far more of their portfolio / projects / case studies before going into job titles and company history.

I'd rather point people to my personal website for that kind of content - don't want to be more beholden than necessary to someone else hosting my stuff

Sure, I have that too. But there's also the discovery aspect of a platform like LinkedIn

I link to my personal website on LinkedIn :)

The already mentioned PolyWork offers indeed this focus on skills.

Mainly for devs.....

LinkedIn recently added content analytics. It seems they are trying to be some type of Tiktok/YouTube/IG for business. Have you considered posting content related to your field?

Linkedin is only useful because of the network effects of having a lot of people on it. Most of the complaints about linkedin are about the people on it (and the tendency of some to use it as a platform for self promotion) Any platform looking to replace linkedin would have the same issues.

Building a social network is hard, building a social network for professionals is even harder.

It's already tricky to convince your friends to use a different messenger, it's even harder to convince your coworker, boss or other peers to join a new network and putting your reputation on the line of being the person sending out invites.

Linkedin isn't great, but it does the job, everyone is there and I guess nobody is spending hours on the platform except recruiters or influencers.

As a tool to have an address book of professional acquaintances for getting an intro, referral or reference in the future it works well enough.

There should be no personal updates. Updates should be from individuals but relating to industry, e.g. making an announcement, asking for advice, promoting a job opening, discussing an industry topic. There should be no updates of a personal nature e.g. I got up at 4am and took my disabled child to school after getting them an ice cream, please upvote my demonstration of effort.

Very hard to moderate that. Personal vs professional can also be subjective. If you're an influencer, what's the difference? Should you then be banned from the platform?

Well, probably?

It's subjective, but since there is some scale (from personal to professional), couldn't there be a way to classify this and filter it out? That would be a cool feature.

I have the same complaints as everyone, though I think LinkedIn may not be so easy to replicate. If you think about it, they have basically made a voluntary resume board on which (I'd guess) a majority of professionals or close to it have posted their resumes. Most people just use it as a static site, but the business, and importantly the overall network effects that push people to add their profiles, are subsidized by the small group that posts all the crap that's on there.

To replicate this, you'd need to find some other way to incentivize everyone to sign up (or at least for som niche). It can't just be the technical capability of adding a profile.

It's a self-CEOs and HR circle jerk platform. An alternative would have to depart from trying to create same type of engagement as FB or Twitter, as it would run down the same path, but focus on showcasing skills and providing better search options.

hmmm, but I'm still afraid that a push for monetization and YOY growth would eventually ruin whatever good is made.

If it is bootstrapped, would you pay $1-2 per month (charged annually) for a service like this? Removing the pressure for YoY growth.

professional's won't take you seriously unless you charge $50 minimum per year, probably closer to $100.

Good to know. I think $5-10 sounds very reasonable.

Hmm that's tricky, you have to keep in mind that with $100 per year you're maybe limiting entry in markets with a lot of resources (e.g. IT professionals in India).

Maybe I'm wrong, dunno about price points, I do know I find it quite easy to support someone on Patreon with $5 per month if I find the content valuable. And this should not be viewed as more valuable, people are not constantly looking to switch jobs or take on more work, for many it would be pretty passive network (as is LinkedIn).

That doesn’t actually remove the pressure for growth from what I can see.

A network site has value only when the people I want in my network are on it. That’s pressure for growth, whether driven by me inviting them or you enticing them somehow.

I doubt you’ll find many people willing to pay for a subscription to a new upstart LinkedIn that doesn’t have at least some critical mass of users already. Would I pay $20/yr for an actually better LinkedIn? Probably. Would I pay $100/yr for news.yc? Absolutely. Would I pay $20/yr for a networking website with 50K users, 0-3 of which I know? No.

Sure, I paid for LI premium to check out courses (1 trial + 1 to finish) but did not find added value worth the money. Same way I pay on patreon for content I get for free anyways, to support spam-less quality content. 1-5 USD per month is a range many would pay to have a clean professional environment, and it would eliminate bots.

Problem (that I see) is getting something like that off the ground, to reach critical mass.

Also if it goes public, would it remain like that without further pressure to bring more income. Courses do sound like a quality idea from Linkedin, but other (MOOC) platforms seem to be doing it better. Perhaps a partnership with a MOOC platform...

Yes the newsfeed can look like that which is why I unfollow almost everyone...

I use it to stay connected with professional connects many whom are friends and then I message them on the platform. It works well for this i.e. mantaining one's professional network.

I don't. I want the one linkedin that everybody is on. Now, if they'd remove the ability for people to "reach an audience" (the "wall" or whatever that feed is called) it'd be pretty good.

The complaints about LinkedIn I've seen are not so much about the product itself but about the social media culture that formed around it.

yeah, if there is something to replace about linkedin – its people

Honestly, no I don't want a LinkedIn alternative. I only have it so that potential employers can google me and (after my blog and/or github) look at the way I present myself professionally. It's mostly static and I visit LinkedIn maybe once per 3 months, probably less. If there was a "new LinkedIn" that gained significant traction, it would just mean another profile to keep up to date for no real gain.

Yes, there is indeed a lot of humblebragging on LinkedIn but it's fine. Don't go there if you don't like that kind of thing.

Something like a MySpace for business would be interesting. Make it super easy to build a landing page for yourself, with a CV, portfolio, links to your profiles like GitHub. Give the user a lot of control over the appearance.

And then people can add contacts to their network, but I'm not sure how much weight you should give to the social network part. The profiles should be in the foreground. Though it is interesting to see who is connected to whom. You could have the "vouching for skills" thing LinkedIn used to have. If you are looking to differentiate from other platforms, maybe you could add discussion groups / mailing lists, that alumni groups, or shared interest groups would use (e.g. Electronics Hackers in Berlin).

There are also several ways to monetize it without being obnoxious. You can offer to host the profile on custom domains for a fee, and you can sell custom themes for profile and CV. Also you could make money selling physical business cards in a matching theme, and other nicely printed accessories.

What I would not do is to sell the users data, or sell premium accounts which see more data. Everything people put in the site is public anyway, and should be easily accessible - that's the whole point of getting a landing page. Also stay away from social media. Nobody wants another feed of reshared news articles or artificial inspirational posts.

There are already loads of work-/job-/cv-related social networks out there (Polywork is one of the more recent examples) ... none of them have the cachet (or staying power) of LinkedIn [so far]

I wish you well in trying to build something new ... but I'm already on too many social networks, and won't be joining any more (I've been deactivating accounts over the past several months because they're either too low traffic, or too hard to keep up with)

I'd actually like to see Microsoft leverage LinkedIn as some kind of universal identity platform - they've got LI, they've got Azure, they've got O365, they've got GitHub[0][1][2] ... why should I have to get a new identity every time I change employers? Unify the whole shebang (albeit with an alias to the new employer, and being locked-out of previous employers' data)

----------------

[0] https://antipaucity.com/2018/06/05/ben-thompson-missed-a-lot...

[1] https://stratechery.com/2018/the-cost-of-developers/

[2] https://stratechery.com/2016/microsoft-and-apple-double-down...

Gods yes! I deleted my account years ago because I didn't like their shady practices, and they had nothing to offer me anyway.

Since I become "established", so to say, I've gotten all my jobs through personal contacts. What would be of interest to me however, would be a place where:

* (A bit like HN) where we can have focused discussions on technological developments * I can connect with other people I value the opinions of, can learn from, share my knowledge / experiences with * Place we can crowd-source things like this very post * Find events and keep up with what's happening in my field

Importantly though — and I can't stress this enough: _No sales or marketing people_. Basically, a place for professionals in their field who actually do the work. I understand that sales and marketing people can contribute to the success of a business, I'm just saying I don't care and don't want them on the platform.

In short, no.

The problem there, just like with any other social networking site, is the monetization. Many annoying features are actually generating revenue. So you're a product and that won't change. And after a period of developmen and growth you'd end up in similar situation like LinkedIn.

Like a place with real, or at least vaguely realistic, job titles?

Not, say, CEO of Myself, Inc. ?

I use linkedin for prospecting. I would love a tool that makes it easier to identify companies that likely have a need for what I'm building and the specific person within that firm who is responsible for solving that problem.

This could be based on job title, job postings, a correlation between a job posting and the hiring manager, individual posts, etc.

At one point, I was paying 200/month for Sales Navigator. I found that while the tools were were nice, they weren’t really worth paying for and I was still doing a lot of manual work.

Monetisation of Linkedin works because they provide features job seekers and current employees don't want. Recruitment agents love it, but then again it makes it harder for them to justify their existence.

For me (full time employee who wants to keep in touch with previous collegues, record a CVish, look for jobs occasionally) I want a single source. Things are actually better now I don't need to monitor a dozen different boards and pages. So unless you become the dominant platform, I don't want another.

It would be interesting if recruiters had different rights than the traditional user. At the airport, taxis and Ubers must be authorized to enter and solicit rides to people. The same could occur in the New LinkedIn. Recruiters must be registered and only interact with users in authorized sections of the site, presumably the section where job seekers are present. Normal users should not be hassled by recruiters in their chat, else they should be reported.

I do report unwanted contacts from recruiters - it's a functionality that already exists

LinkedIn is fine, it is the people using it is the problem. Recruiters spamming irrelevant people etc. And they would just move to not-linkedin and create the same issues

One odd feature I would love from LinkedIn: let me make my profile invisible to literally everyone except connections I specify. I know this will sound niche but if I just got a new job or even a raise, I dont want random strangers contacting me! Just the simplest of options to be able to not be pestered would be nice.

When you make a change to your job/status you can make it so it doesn't get propagated to the rest of your network. I keep all my status changes quiet for the exact same reason as you would like.

I want a LinkedIn where I can post my skill set and what kind of roles I’d be interested in and employers come to me.

That was the theory behind Job.SO ... and Stack Exchange decided to close the doors on it a while back because it wasn't effective enough

Pretty much nobody wants LinkedIn, why would they want an alternative?

Maybe the 1% of the management class who enjoy prattling on about "business" on the internet love it, but literally everyone else loathes its very existence, and not because they "want something better"

Plugging the project of a friend: https://mazury.xyz/

It's web3-focused for now (and the blockchain is core to how it works: i.e. to collect certified attestations) but I think it has much broader ambitions.

All I want is something that is NOT owned by a big corp, especially NOT MS, Google or Amazon.

What happens if/when the new site becomes a "big corp"?

How "big" is "too big" to you?

There is some local competitors in different countries - at least the german Xing is one that i know of.

You should try to find out what their advantage on local/national markets is and see if that helps answering or refining your questions.

I think https://read.cv/ is almost there in terms of what I'd expect from a professional social network

Im actually quite happy with LinkedIn. But while we are wishing for things, I would like for recruiters to actually read your profile before contacting you ;)

if you build a product solely based on what people think they want/need, you will fail.

LinkedIn isn't perfect, but it fills a gap and that's to help find people jobs. If you create another social app but without the incentive of people making posts about w/e the fuck they want to post about it, it's going to be boring and not active.

edit: to be clear, i hate the cringiness of LI as well, but it's a necessary evil.

Like HN?

I'd like to see a professional network that doesn't encourage people to humble brag, engage in toxic positivity or post cringy stuff.

Polywork is attempting this: https://www.polywork.com/

I found Otta (https://otta.com) to be a nice alternative to LinkedIn.

No!

We already have LinkedIn. It's good for what it is. We DON'T NEED a dozen different professional social networks! Just NO!

LinkedIn works, I don't like it, but I CAN use it to scout for people and for new jobs.

I don't even want linkedin, let alone another thing like it....

Github is my LinkedIn alternative.

Microsoft understood that very well then (it owns both).

Is that why they disabled the jobs features? :D

Not really, no.

yes. its email.

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