Show HN: LinkedIn sucks, so I built a better one | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: LinkedIn sucks, so I built a better one

heyopenspot.com

470 pointsfliellerjulian377 comments

LinkedIn feels more like Facebook every day — noisy feeds, fake engagement, and everyone shouting into the void.

Thats why I used to built a personal microsite on Squarespace and uploaded a video resume to YouTube to stand out - it helped me land interviews and get into Big Tech.

But I always wondered: why isn’t there a platform designed to help you stand out like that?

So I built OpenSpot: a public, curated platform where you can showcase who you are — with video, audio, and proof of your work. No endless feeds. No humblebrags. Just real people open to new opportunities.

We’ve already onboarded a few companies, so recruiters can reach out to you directly. But you can also connect with other standout folks and supercharge your network.

Just upload your resume and we´ll automatically generate your profile in under 1 minute.

It’s early, but feels like something people actually need. Would love your thoughts.

Open articleView on HN

Why are there photos on a resume site, and featured so prominently? It's not Tinder.

US HR used to throw away any photos that people attached to resumes. (Usually someone attaching a photo was a recent immigrant, who didn't know the US convention.)

I've even heard rumors that some companies/screeners had a policy of throwing away resumes that included photos or other gratuitous information that could be the basis for illegal/problematic discrimination.

"Because LinkedIn does it" isn't a good argument, because LinkedIn is pretty awful, and the only things going for it are: (1) the majority of people are on it, and (2) recruiters sometimes search/spam there.

Some social media sites do photos because they pander to the worst. Or, in the case of one prominent social media site, infamously because the original inspiration was to catalog the best-looking women at their college.

Unless you're a headshots site/app for hiring models/actors, best to go with content-of-their-character, and all that.

Right? Photos and video? Why would I ever want to post video on my resume? Why would I ever want to watch someone’s video if I was hiring? Are we trying to land tech roles or screen time on reality TV?

1. Agreed... But just for funsies:

2. There's a variety of roles out there, and for many "executive presence" is important qualification.

(But really though,its because of tiktok)

I get it on 2, but I’m not sure how good a take you’d get on that from a rehearsed, scripted video.

I also sort of feel like, people already hate cover letters. Now we’re trying to normalize audition videos? Maybe it’s me who’s out of touch?

Totally understand where you're coming from — and it's a super fair concern.

We're not trying to turn hiring into a popularity contest or a casting call. The point of video or a photo isn’t to favor looks — it’s to give people a chance to show personality, communication skills, or walk through a project — especially in roles where that matters (e.g. PMs, founders, designers, etc.).

That said, both video and photo are optional. We’ve seen that for many candidates, especially those early in their careers or from non-traditional backgrounds, a short video can dramatically increase response rates — not because of appearance, but because it humanizes them and cuts through the noise of generic applications.

We’re 100% aligned that character and substance matter most — we just want to give people more ways to show that, not perform for it.

If we were in a perfect world, I'd agree, but unfortunately that isn't the case. The cons here are far more prevalent than the pros, as photos and videos will lead to discrimination before the main part of what matters, the resumé, your experience and your actual knowledge, shines through.

There's a reason these things aren't standard in resumés (at least for jobs that don't have a focus on appearance).

> photos and videos will lead to discrimination

I feel like video will help mitigate this, as personalty and soft skills are communicated better that way. But if a company is going to discriminate based on a video, then they are going to discriminate when they interview you in person, no?

>photos and videos will lead to discrimination before the main part of what matters,

We're in such a connected age that anyone wanting to know your face can 99% of the time just google your name. That was an issue talked about even 20 years ago in my grade school days of Myspace.

Unless you legitmately have no photo of yourself on the internet (including LinkdIn), adding a photo here will not give or take much away from a malicious actor.

>There's a reason these things aren't standard in resumés

because companies are so scared of litigation that they won't even give feedback anymore. It's not a particularly good reason if we're being honest.

Do you have any guesses as to how much the photo/video on a resume site is used for legitimate purposes, vs. how much it's used/influencing in illegal, unfair, or inappropriate ways?

Another potential big issue is the community itself. A huge reason why LinkedIn is so hated is the community that's on there, and how the various engineering/design choices made by LinkedIn over the years amplifies and encourages those behaviors. Things like humble bragging, writing styles, DMing patters, etc etc etc.

And I don't know if building another platform with a feed will solve that problem. Because the existence of a social feed itself might be the issue here. But then what do you have if you don't have a feed? Is that a "platform" anymore if all that's on there are peoples' resumes?

I feel that building the next LinkedIn is really building the next LinkedIn community. That can't necessarily be done through computer code. I mean, look at the kind of community building that it took to build out HN.

Things like humble bragging, writing styles, DMing patters, etc etc etc.

This exists because there is limited courage to call this out. There are not many polite ways to tell someone this, you would need people in their life to pull them aside and point it out. It's very similar to being the friend that pulls someone outside and explains they need to brush their teeth (someone has to do this, with love). Maybe more working professionals need to blog about this so the broader community can be educated on behavior when it comes to excess vanity and general manners.

For example, it's simply rude to broadcast your new job when some people are struggling with it (will they ever get one? will they get fired? are they good enough?). Just the very fact that there are "some" should be enough to kickstart one's manners, even if that "some" is not a lot of people.

It's simply rude to continuously market things (anything) when there are people literally ... stressing themselves over the pressure of competition. Again, as an example, a person constantly marketing their looks is putting stress and pressure on many others - this is a simple fact. The same goes for those with wealth and opportunity.

> For example, it's simply rude to broadcast your new job when some people are struggling with it (will they ever get one? will they get fired? are they good enough?). Just the very fact that there are "some" should be enough to kickstart one's manners, even if that "some" is not a lot of people.

To be fair, LinkedIn is nominally a professional networking site. Broadcasting your new job is absolutely in scope for that site.

It’s the “what the death of my dog taught me about viral content marketing” or “how my child losing her soccer game made me a better manager” posts that are out of control.

My personal favorites are people bragging about working during their wedding / funeral / vacation. “Joe is such a dedicated worker! Look he is taking time out from his bachelor party to deploy this database schema change!”

> For example, it's simply rude to broadcast your new job when some people are struggling with it

LinkedIn is a job site. It is completely appropriate to announce you got a job. I want to know that people in my network have a job whether I have one or not. It means that I can reach out to them and ask if the company is still hiring.

> For example, it's simply rude to broadcast your new job when some people are struggling with it

> It's simply rude to continuously market things (anything) when there are people literally ... stressing themselves over the pressure of competition

> a person constantly marketing their looks is putting stress and pressure on many others

The way you put it nothing should ever happen.

Everything has pros and cons. There's no perfect solution to make everyone happy.

For example if I vote for 1 party, the other party loses votes so puts stress and pressure on them i.e. I shouldn't vote? Then they both lose out.

Or we should have monopolies everywhere because introducing competition puts stress and pressure on the existing player?

People don't check your intentions before they discriminate, they just do.

Because catfishing is a thing on today's job market.

This ain't a resume. You'd still need to apply for jobs. This is probably closer to your blog but hosted by someone else. A way to build connections outside of the recruitment process.

So... Basically LinkedIn. Where it is your "vacation photo and what it taught me about inbound marketing" type of bs.

Well if it is BS or not is a culture issue. LinkedIn has a culture (as does X as does Facebook as does Reddit as does Youtube).

That is hard to prescribe and those tech giants probably don't care much what it is as long as people are engaged.

Good thing then that this is a LinkedIn replacement ;)

There are several countries that demand your photo on resumes, especially the German speaking ones.

I'm german and i did not know this.

I'm also German:

In former days (until perhaps the end of the 90s) sending in a photo as part of an application was expected. But by now the customs have changed.

They should stop doing that then. Absolutely no good reason for it in the first place, other than discrimination.

In this day and age of AI overdrive, it may in fact be a more and more viable way to verify candidates.

How so ?

Job applications already get inunduated with hundreds, thousands of candidates, of which 90% are bots submitting for canddiates. Some companies are resorting to the dreaded video submissions to filter that out, but even that may not be safe long term.

Photos may not be the final solution to this flood of automation, but it's being dabbled with.

Sure but I see absolutely no way a picture would allow you to tell if someone's a bot or not.

You can already generate a profile picture and have it lip synced with a text to speech audio (or even speech to speech). It's a losing (lost?) fight

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FK8sgB-58q0

Internet is rapidly becoming a pile of steaming shit already, captchas were annoying but now it seems the "are you a robot" test is coming everywhere, what a sad state of affairs. I wonder how much of the overall traffic is automated, 80%? 90% ?

Adding a field that AI can generate cheaply sounds like a way to INCREASE AI spam

cheap is part of the factor here. Pictures aren't expensive to generate, but are a magnitude more expensive than generating a bunch of text. Meanwhile, pictures are trivial for humans to verify against a simple search.

> Meanwhile, pictures are trivial for humans to verify against a simple search

The majority of people do not have a picture of them on the Internet.

What do you mean by "demand"?

https://bewerbung.com/lebenslauf-ohne-bewerbungsfoto/

> Eine Bewerbung ohne Foto zu verschicken, ist in den vergangenen Jahren zu einem regelrechten Trend geworden. Bei vielen Personalern genießen Lebensläufe ohne Bewerbungsfoto daher eine hohe Akzeptanz [...]

I'd say that depends on the business area, the small "Krauter" around the corner probably requires a photo. But as this is not the target group of this project, I would argue that images are not really required.

I meant it as more of a nice to have

Disclaimer: I’m bad about remembering faces. Every photo with a name below helps me a lot.

We shall not copy everything from America.

And the site goes on…

    Trotzdem ist die Bewerbung ohne Foto nach wie vor eher die Ausnahme als die Regel. Denn ein sympathisches Bild erweckt einen guten ersten Eindruck. Somit wird Deine Bewerbung mit einer positiveren Grundeinstellung gesichtet, was zum Vorteil werden kann.

    Richtig gestaltet, drückt das Bewerberbild außerdem Professionalität aus, lässt Deine Persönlichkeit erkennen und verdeutlicht, dass Du zur Unternehmenskultur passt. Grundlegende Informationen wie Dein Geschlecht oder Deine Herkunft lassen sich aus Deinem Lebenslauf ohnehin oft ableiten, beispielsweise aus Deinem Namen. Zudem finden die Personaler im Internet meist schnell ein Foto von Dir, wenn gewünscht.

The company will anyway see you, if you’re lucky. Your name, birthdate, education and address (people often underestimate the address) tell a lot. I don’t care about colors of hair, eyes or skin and the scar across the check is at least something which allows me to recognize a person.

In my humble European opinion, you shouldn't be including your date of birth or home address either. Full name is just about acceptable.

<irony> And a cell phone number from a throw away phone?

Of course for every application a new one! </irony>

> We shall not copy everything from America.

You should copy not needing photos on CVs. Doing so introduces an unacceptable risk of bias.

Not all bias is bad.

It is when it's based purely on physical appearance in the context of evaluating job applicants.

It's a myth or 80s thing (maybe in GDR).

I worked in multiple German companies, never had photo in my CV, never had been asked for a photo. This is just not true.

Resume site or professional network?

I believe historically CVs had pictures in Europe, and the "standardized" CV (Europass) still invites you to put one in[0].

Most people I spoke with said if you show up with Europass it's considered a negative flag, but I suppose it may still be useful for some "less modern" jobs.

[0] https://europass.europa.eu/

Why would it be considered a negative flag? I've been using it my whole professional life (~15 years, multiple jobs) and never had an issue with it.

It's just a PDF in the end.

As I understand it, cause HR don't care about most of it.

It encourages you to put a lot of things in it which are generally not interesting, much like in the old days you'd list the ability to drive a car in your CV, or having finished the mandatory military conscription.

People prefer a one pager with relevant experiences than a five pages which include your id number, birth date and address.

You can of course do a Europass CV with less info, it's just not how people do it generally, according to the people who complained about it (I'm just reporting what I heard, I don't care about the CV format)

Ah well that explains things, I have a one-page Europass CV.

“Standard EU CV”… why doesn’t that surprise me. At least it’s not required by law. Yet. Don’t send photos.

Exactly, shouldn’t really matter.

Yeah, I'd feel uncomfortable receiving a CV with a photo on it. I don't want to be accused of anything if I reject a candidate. Likewise I don't want to see your DoB either.

It is surprising how culturally specific this is though - I've had CVs for hiring in our offshore centre in India where a candidate listed his father's details as a contact.

You're likely great at remembering multiple candidates' faces, as the hiring process often spans weeks or even months, with several candidates interviewing for the same position. Having a picture attached to a resume can be really helpful, much like how a LinkedIn profile picture adds value.

I'm awful at faces, but I'm worried about leaving myself open to a possible liability

Yeah, let's focus on the liability, let's cover our ass. Instead of worrying about what this headshot thing really is about: giving everyone a fair chance by factoring out possible discrimination based on gender, race, haircut...

I wouldn't consciously discriminate on those characteristics. I want it removed so I can't unconsciously do it or be accused of it.

This is both sanest and fairest: some roles in the UK civil service are blind recruited for the first stages for exactly this reason. IMO it should be standard.

Interestingly, it was a culture shock when I saw that in other countries (that tend to have a more homogenous ethnic population) informally require photos. Not having a photo on a resume almost guaranteed the resume would go into the trash.

Even more of a culture shock was how much more open people are about their biases in those cases. "We can't have someone short doing job X, or they don't have a friendly face for Y, etc."

100% My partner had chestnut brown painted hair, she had to wear a black wig in order to work at 711 in China.

Several years ago, I had a Dutch girl apply for a traineeship-level position with my business in Australia, and she included a number of photos, including a 'glamour' shot of her straddling a chair. Quite bizarre.

Did you hire her?

The trainees cost USD$100/week, but for a very small business, ensuring trainees get a good working and learning experience chews a lot of time hand-holding and so I passed.

The reality is that for many jobs the appearance actually does matter.

I am from India and an US based MNC's HR reached back to me and asked me to put a photo, my permanent address, DoB, and passport number. And I did, because the other way was to not go through that interview and possibly being blacklisted by that company. It used to be a norm here (improving but not so much), what wasn't normal was an international MNC demanding that right in the beginning. We are often asked for alternate contact details - it's a field and they must as you fill it! I literally don't have anyone like that so I just add my secondary mobile number.

I think sometimes companies will ask for passports for the purpose of visa checking, but hopefully that doesn't get as far as the hiring manager once the paperwork is all confirmed.

In India they will have been listing the fathers contact for exactly the reasons you should not have their fathers contact.

> US HR used to throw away any photos that people attached to resumes. (Usually someone attaching a photo was a recent immigrant, who didn't know the US convention.)

Don't they recommend having LinkedIn profile picture for better chances of getting shortlisted? Also assuming you are talking about physical resumes. Wouldn't having a photo attached to resume make more sense in terms of identifying the candidate correctly at any given stage of recruitment, before or after the in person interview?

The recommendation I've seen is to include a LinkedIn profile URL on your resume. This was with the intent that those reviewing said resume would be able to verify that a real person was behind it. I suppose that's reasonable, no?

I never put my real headshot on LinkedIn even before it was scrapped for AI training. LinkedIn still bugs me to put a picture to "increase engagement".

Putting headshot in resumes is not expected and even cringe in my country, but some countries expect headshots and other highly personal info. No thanks.

I'm not exactly sold on the counterpoint I'm about to share but, one thing I hear frequently at least on Reddit is "they're going to see your face sooner or later, and they'll realize you're old,black or whatnot so what's the point of hiding photos and birth dates?"

For example, and I can only speak in anecdotes from my experience job searching in Greece, I had HR reps asking me my birth date, or when I'm gonna get married (I'm single).

So it's like, people who will discriminate on me exist, and I can only work on my real skills.

My counter argument to this is that the later in the process your face is shown, the fewer people have the option to discriminate and therefore the fewer arbitrary filters you have to pass through. And ideally the people who are discriminating at that point are the people you'd actually be working with, so their discrimination (however arbitrary) is more relevant bc you might continue to experience it on the job (not to say that jobs where a person is discriminatory isn't one worth taking or possible to work past.)

It's not 0 or 1. You won't be able to remove every bigoted recruiters from their companies, but you can always try to make their job harder, and limit the harm they may cause.

It's a resume(ish) site, not a resume?

How am I supposed to distinguish the thousands, maybe millions of Johns and Janes without a picture to recognize them by?

Haha fair — it’s kind of in between a resume and a portfolio.

OpenSpot isn’t meant to replace formal resumes entirely — it’s designed to help people stand out before that stage. It’s public, searchable, and curated — so if a recruiter finds someone interesting, they can reach out directly or request a formal resume.

Photos are optional, but yeah — they can help distinguish one Jane Doe from another, especially in a directory-style setting. Same goes for a short intro, project link, or anything else that brings some personality into the mix.

Hmm, I think I agree with you. I used to not add a picture of myself, because I think my experience and skills are more important. Until I kept hearing again and again that I should add a picture to my resume. So I added a picture, but now I open myself up to be judged by the cover or even get thrown away upfront.

I'm from The Netherlands.

Totally hear you — and I really appreciate how thoughtfully you laid this out.

Photos are not required on OpenSpot - We included them because some people want to humanize their profile — but we’re also very aware of the bias/discrimination concerns, especially in the U.S.

The intent isn’t to mimic LinkedIn or create a polished image-centric profile like a dating app — it’s to offer optional ways for people to show who they are, beyond just a list of bullet points. For some, that’s a photo. For others, it’s a project demo or a short intro about their work.

That said, we’re actively listening and learning. If we find that photos do more harm than good — especially around bias or UX — we’re open to evolving that part of the product.

Thanks again for the thoughtful take — this kind of feedback makes the product better.

In tech, I have found the best way to stand out is a personal technical blog. Write about things you’ve worked on. Doing is the best way to learn, and writing about doing is the second best way to show you know. (The first is a demo.)

The LinkedIn feed problem can be solved by not going to the feed.

Totally agree — writing about what you’ve built is a great way to both learn and stand out. Blogs, demos, and personal sites are powerful signals, especially in tech.

Openspot actually leans into that same idea: instead of feeding the algorithm, you just show your work — whether that’s a blog post, demo, video, or a quick walkthrough. It’s all hosted on your profile, so you can focus on signal over noise.

>Totally agree — writing about what you’ve built is a great way to both learn and stand out

Stand out? "Write about stuff" is literally generic advice nowadays. Most of the content is crap, because people are only writing because other people suggest it.

Writing a blog relatively regularly got me job offers from FAANG companies and book offers from publishers (some of the latter I accepted). It's also a good exercise to get better at your job because communicating effectively is just as important a skill for programmers as writing code is.

Are you saying that anyone in your interview loop took time to read your blog posts? And it wasn’t just you passing the standard interview process like everyone else has to do.

I read it as them being approached by faang recruiters or hiring managers because they happened to stumble upon their blog and thought they might be a good fit. Although idk if that sort of thing happens anymore

FAANG recruiters are dumb and not selective. They definitely don’t look at blog posts.

- a recruiter from Amazon Retail reached out to me about an SDE 3 (L6) position when I had nothing on my LinkedIn profile aside from a bunch of CRUD jobs on my profile. I

- After talking to the recruiter, they suggested I apply for a remote role at AWS Professional Services which I did get. Funny enough, I had two recruiters reach out to me from Amazon on LinkedIn while I was - working at Amazon and it was on my profile.

- I had a recruiter from Google reach out to me while I was at Amazon for an Engineering Manager position. The problem is, my current position wasn’t even a software developer on my profile and I had no management experience.

- a recruiter from Meta hounded me for months about a senior position as a developer specializing in AI. Did I mention that my most recent role at the time wasn’t as a software developer and I had no AI experience?

- Even before working at Amazon, recruiters from Netflix reached out to me. No I wouldn’t have had any chance passing the interview

Recruiters - even at BigTech reach out to anyone with a pulse. I still get recruiters from BigTech reaching out to me about software development positions even though for the past five years my profile clearly shows a pivot to cloud consulting and customer engagement.

> Recruiters - even at BigTech reach out to anyone with a pulse.

The purpose of the tech blog isn’t to impress recruiters because as you say they are impressed if you mention drinking a cup of java once or have a pet python. The primary purpose is for your own understanding. The secondary purpose is to impress someone familiar with your field.

People inside the company (not recruiters) read my blog and started the recruiting process.

I've had interviewers talk to me about my personal site, but it's on my resume so it's not like they had to search.

They said at BigTech companies where the interview process is very regimented and the interviewer at most has an hour and comes in with a known set of questions.

strange to think there are more than just BigCo out there, huh?

Yes but the parent commenter said.

> Writing a blog relatively regularly got me job offers from FAANG companies.

okay. And BigCo wasn't always bigco, right? It shouldn't be a surpise many in this community may have experiences going back 15,20,30+ years in a completely different tech landscape. I envy that, but what can you do?

I’m still not following you. The commenter said that they got an offer at a FAANG because of a blog.

That’s just not how things work at FAANG. There is a regimented process with multiple interviews and then after the interviews, all of the interviewers enter their notes and discuss. I can’t imagine anyone in the loop saying “I read their blog post and they should be hired”.

Hiring is completely about some combination of how the candidate did on coding, system design and behavioral interviews.

In 2010 (15 years ago), all of the current FAANG companies were already large except Meta and it was growing rapidly.

In 2005 (20 years ago), how many people were blogging? 20 years ago, the interview process was even more esoteric than it is today at least at Google. I haven’t heard stories about any of the others

Yes I was around back then.

>That’s just not how things work at FAANG

Hey, it's me, the person who said that!

>I read their blog post and they should be hired

Yes, that's what happened. Obviously, it's not "I read your blog, sign this contract, and you're hired." The actual sequence of events the one time I said yes was:

"Hey, I read your blog. I work for team X at company Y. Are you interested in working here?"

"Yes"

"OK, HR will contact you."

A 20-minute call with HR, followed by an invitation to onsite team interviews. One day of interviews. Job offer.

I have no idea what the internal process for that was, but I assume they have some referral program or something like that.

>In 2005 (20 years ago), how many people blogged?

I started blogging before the word "blogging" existed. I wrote my blogging software without knowing it was "blogging software."

you were around 20 years ago and heard zero stories of some individuals who skipped the weird pothole brain teasers because they had clearly already proven themselves (or better yet, were potential compettion they bought up early?). I fail to believe it was universally that strict.

Yes, I can see someone standing out in 2005 making helpful blogs qualifying under this. I can see it in 2015 as well if they are a subject matter expert or happen to otherwise be explaining the exact concepts a certain team needed.

I can't verify it firsthand, but clearly processes can be waived if desired. I did an entire interview gauntlet for my first "big" tech job in 2019. My lead hired the year prior describes his process as a director calling to him over lunch to talk about the company and basically got the offer on the spot, as if it was the 60's all over again. The director was in the same room as me nodding as my lead told the story.

Heck, even a mild anectode: a colleague of mine (maybe 2-3 years ahead of me in experience) was able to skip some coding test stage at Amazon to move through the process faster because he negotiated being close to another offer. Great worker but he didn't have any fancy accolades nor side projects/blogs. It was just a burning hot market and FAANG wanted whoever they could grab with good experience.

Fair point. I've been an interviewer with a fixed set of questions myself - mostly so the company can demonstrate an impartial hiring process.

Someone at the company read my blog, asked me if I was interested in a job on their team, and initiated the hiring process if I said yes.

Are you comfortable with sharing the URL of your blog?

I find the idea interesting, but also puzzling -- If you work at a commercial company on proprietary software, like most of software engineers, there is very limited amount of things you can talk about work and not leak proprietary/internal information. Otherwise, you need to work enough outside work to have things you can talk about freely. I don't want to have a blog where it's all opinion and no concrete details, like my meaningless comments on HN. How do you manage to post "useful" things on a personal blog?

I'm also curious about what kinds of posts were good enough to get job offers. In my experience it's hard to consistently produce thorough, accurate, and useful technical posts. It takes so much time.

If you have the time, though, open-source is a good way to work on non-proprietary, useful things.

You can discuss things unrelated to genuinely proprietary information. But this depends on the company—I worked for several companies whose secret sauce was more related to proprietary business information rather than proprietary tech, so they gave close to zero shits if I publicly wrote about it and, at times, republished my posts on their own company blog to make themselves more attractive to devs.

I also have a bunch of personal projects about which I can talk.

Topics like "what we learned load-balancing a tomcat cluster" contain genuinely useful information, but the company I worked for at the time didn't consider them proprietary because the proprietary stuff was what they ran on the cluster.

I'll acknowledge that this won't be the case for everybody. I've been pretty lucky that none of the companies I worked for prevented me from writing about these topics; some were happy to use what I wrote for their own promotional material.

(I don't want to dox myself, so I'd rather not share a link to my blog, and "what we learned load-balancing a tomcat cluster" isn't the literal title of a blog post I wrote.)

I'd recommend having a read of my blog (https://www.jvt.me/archives/), as I've been in a similar position, and heavily blogging my career

For instance between 2016-2021 where I was working in a large financial institution (Capital One), but still blogging about the work I was doing and problems I was solving, without leaking proprietary information

A lot of them didn't have the "context" for what problem was being solved or why, or I'd need to create a minimal example to help explain what needs to be fixed, which is also a very good skill to be more practiced in

You can also see how over the years of my career (https://hire.jvt.me/), some organisations have led to me blogging more openly about /what/ I'm doing

I've recently started blogging again, mostly as a form of documentation for myself later at this point. I'm always working on some weird project, I'll get to some milestone, lose a bit of interest, think about it two months later only to realize I'd have to relearn everything and don't do it.

Having a blog allows me to compile my notes into a digestible and easy to read way, so if I revisit a project later I at least don't have to start from scratch.

Agreed, but there isn't a really solid blogging platform anymore that:

- Offers a dev "enough" control (some HTML/CSS/JS support but not total control)

- Stays largely out of the way (maybe something like a "powered by" header/footer only)

- Doesn't try to lock free posts behind paywalls

- Is independently owned and not a big tech product (so no Blogger)

- Is abstracted enough so that someone doesn't need to know domain, DNS, hosting, VPS, or sysadmin stuff in general to start a website

The closest things I've seen to this are Neocities and Glitch. The best one used to be Blogger, but again it's big tech so you can't use it without being assimilated into the Google collective consciousness.

Bear Blog meets every one of your requirements.

https://bearblog.dev

You can see examples on the discover page.

https://bearblog.dev/discover

It has a small collection of simple pre-built themes, while also supporting custom CSS.

https://docs.bearblog.dev/styling

At that point you just whip up a github pages domain and use your favorite frontend framework with some blogging framework taken into account. If Microsoft is still a deterrent, you just register your own domain and pay the dozen bucks per year to keep it spinning.

if you really can't be bothered to set any of that up, I suppose you can always find one of the non-mainstream open-source microblogging platforms. I'm sure there are some lovely "reddit alternatives" out there that feel great to blog on but has an audience of a dozen people internally.

There's a ton of those platforms, varying from extremely unknown to fairly well established. I'm pretty sure multiple of them end up as a Show HN every year. The only thing on your list they generally don't do is domain registration, but keeping that separate is generally a good thing. Sibling mentioned bearblog.dev, I'll mention write.as[1].

[1]: https://write.as/

The barrier should not be the platform. If you have something interesting to say, there are many ways in 2025 to deliver text to people’s eyeballs.

You can use GitHub pages with Hugo which is what I do. You can build out a series of GitHub gists that link to each other. You can host a static S3 website with raw HTML. You can post redundantly to Twitter/Bluesky/your own subreddit/Medium/Google drive.

It doesn’t matter if there’s no single solution to every possible problem. The point is to write something interesting so 1) you understand it better 2) you can reference it later if you forget some details 3) you can show off to potential employers.

Whether or not it’s owned by big tech is a non-goal as far as getting a job is concerned.

Micro.blog covers all of your requirement.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micro.blog

Just write your own blog software. It's surprising how much you can do with just a <textarea> save it in a database. Then print out the content on a web site.

I've written 20K or so words about this idea (meta-idea?). Some of those words might be intelligent... https://ineffable.deanebarker.net/

I have a personal technical journal[0].

Pretty sure that I’m really the only person that cares about it. That’s fine with me. I write for myself. Much of what I’ve written has “aged out,” by now (for example, I have a series on the Swift Programming Language[1], that may reflect dated observations).

When I write stuff, it helps me to “firm up” my own knowledge and understanding.

I’m no longer seeking work, but have a LinkedIn profile, so anyone that wants to know me, can get an idea. I basically stay away from LI. Every now and then, I may make a post, when I do a release of something .

[0] https://littlegreenviper.com/miscellany/

[1] https://littlegreenviper.com/series/swiftwater/

> Pretty sure that I’m really the only person that cares about it.

Even if you don't get any useful organic traffic, I find having a technical blog is useful so that when you do go to interviews or submit resumes, hirers can read your blog and quickly establish that you know what you are talking about.

Unrelated note, the inline images (at least in the infrastructure post) makes reading quite hard on mobile since in some parts it's literally a single word per line.

No need to fix it if you don't want to but may be useful.

The images do resize and reflow, to adapt to the viewing context. My phone is an iPhone Mini, and I use that as a lowest common denominator, although I do test with an original SE.

But if there's a place where the text doesn't separate (and flow below), that's a bug, so I'll review.

Specifically in [0] all the images after and including the stirrups have less than one word of text next to them. If it helps inventions cuts off as inventi-ons. I'm on iPhone 8 safari if that helps but is also an older target so as I said if it's outside of scope not necessarily something I'm terribly worried about, it's still readable just a little annoying.

0. https://littlegreenviper.com/infrastructure/

Thanks so much!

I’ll check it out. That’s an old post, that was imported wholesale, from another site.

Good browsers come with mobile emulation in their dev tools that let you test with arbitrary viewports as well as the viewports of common phone models.

So let's put the assumption to test then - did your blog increase the offers that were given to you? Do you still get offers for jobs?

Maybe. I don't know (or really care).

There was a link to a post, here, some time ago, that was about why we should write, and it was mostly for self-benefit. That's why I do it. I'm retired, and spend time learning and honing my skills. I write code for free, for folks that can't afford folks like me. I like to do a good job at it, and I like learning new stuff.

I've found that writing [tutorials, especially] is a great way for me to learn.

Yes. I started writing a newsletter about ai/ml and data science focused on geoscience far the people in my research center. I found that I have all sorts of things I want to discuss and think about and writing a newsletter is a way to get it out of my head and into a format I can interact with and I’m not even sure anyone has ever read my newsletter. I just figured just in case someone is interested in what I’m thinking about that maybe it’s better to share ideas than write them in a journal.

I have referred to my own blog live in an interview for things I don’t quite remember the syntax for. It’s a huge boost.

I also will check out candidates’ blogs if they list them. Some people have “blogs” but the content is mostly throwaway or hello world, but anything more than that is impressive to me. (Same thing with GitHub, hopefully it contains more than just forks of various repos with minimal diffs.)

> Write about things you’ve worked on.

And I really can't. Thanks, games industry. So I need to make it a full time job doing signifigant side projects just to show off my skills for jobs.

Even then, this market right now isn't in "we'll call you" mode unless you're highly specialized.

Good way to have your knowledge fed into an LLM.

Good. That's what I want. Makes it easier for me to get the answer again in the future if I can just ask an LLM instead of hunting through my old blog posts.

I know several coworkers/ex-coworkers that are bad at their job who followed your advice and publish at least once a week on their personal technical blog.

Except that it's 100% AI generated.

So it's only a matter a time before having a personal technical blog is seen as average as having a LinkedIn & GitHub account...

1) Setting up a blog on your own domain is nontrivial to begin with.

2) Wayback machine exists.

3) People who are bad at tech jobs will probably be bad at creating convincing fake tech blogs.

Their point is that with AI generation, (3) is already possible to hide.

> Setting up a blog on your own domain is nontrivial to begin with.

For a dev? Surely you are not being serious.

>In tech, I have found the best way to stand out is a personal technical blog.

5 years ago maybe.

Now every tech/recruiting "influencer" suggests the same tactic, and the vast majority of it is pure slop, checking a box.

I might ask the candidate about one of their blog posts if it is interesting. It will be pretty clear if they wrote it themselves.

What would be an argument that this platform sucks less?

I don't want to record videos of me presenting myself.

LinkedIn seems simple. I post a CV and I toggle if I am open to work or not. Recruiters can find me and I can search for jobs and apply to them. That is all the functionality I need apart from having lots of jobs available on the platform.

Totally valid — if LinkedIn is working for you, that’s awesome.

The reason OpenSpot might "suck less" for some is because it focuses only on one thing: helping people stand out. No feed, no fluff, no algorithm — just a clean, curated profile where you can show off your skills, projects, and intent in a way that cuts through the noise.

And to be clear: you don’t have to record a video. That’s optional. Some people link to projects, write a short blurb, or just highlight their strengths in a more human way than a traditional CV.

It’s not a LinkedIn replacement — it’s an alternative for those who feel like they’re getting buried in the system and want more visibility without the social media layer.

Appreciate the honest question!

Fair enough, thank you for the answer.

Seems like an inherent contradiction to try to stand out using a platform designed to help people to stand out. If you wish to stand out, doing something differently seems like a better option.

At least in my personal experience, having a personal website where I write about interesting stuff I do has opened a lot more doors than linkedin ever did.

My quick feedback / first impressions

One benefit of an algorithmic feed is that it works as as social proof in showing me that other people are actually using the site. Since your site doesn't have a feed apparently by design, you'll need some way of showing me (quickly!) that this is a living, breathing website that people actually use, otherwise it feels like I'm shouting into the void.

Another benefit of a feed is that I can immediately see how my activities and updates will look to other people. But it's not clear during onboarding how things will look to others, let alone who can see my profile and activity. Can any other user view my profile, or is it just a select cohort of hiring managers? Can I even interact with other users on this site who aren't hiring managers?

Next, after I import my resume and setup my profile, I am asked (I think) to write some sort of an article or essay with AI assistance. This step wasn't very clear, but even if it were, this is a huge ask for someone who just started using your site. The first ask should be something much less ambitious, and probably would benefit from gamification to make it feel less like homework

Finally, I clicked on the explore button to try to find folks to connect with. I gave a detailed description of the personas I'm interested in to the bot, and ended up getting a "No matching Candidates found" message. I think you should at least show me something, especially when I can't seem to do a regular search / browse manually -- or suggest better queries

Anyway, I know it's an MVP, and I see answers to some of my questions on your about page, but just offering this as food for thought. The overall onboarding was smooth and I appreciate the resume import experience, and I think you have a strong visual identity. Curious to see where you end up taking this

> But I always wondered: why isn’t there a platform designed to help you stand out like that?

Obviously, because if you make a whole platform like that, nobody stands out any more, but everyone if forced to do more (unpaid) work than they did before. For the recruiters/hiring managers it is impossible to process video and audio at scale either.

Totally fair point — and one we’ve thought a lot about.

The goal with OpenSpot isn’t to force everyone to do more unpaid work or replace resumes entirely — it’s to give people who want to stand out an easy, high-signal way to do so, especially if they’re not getting traction through traditional means.

For recruiters, the platform is curated and searchable, so they’re not sifting through hundreds of TikTok-style intros — they’re seeing real signals of quality, with depth if they want it.

We're not trying to increase the noise — we're trying to cut through it.

You can actually turn off LinkedIn’s recommendations here: https://lnkd.in/gQHsR8ps

Change it to “Most recent posts” and you’ll stop getting random influencers in your feed telling you that vibe coding is the future.

Non-shortened URL for anyone suspicious: https://www.linkedin.com/mypreferences/d/settings/preferred-...

Even better, if you follow no-one, your feed will be completely empty.

I also find LinkedIn spammy and I’m fed up of videos everywhere, so for me the answer is definitely not more videos, sorry.

Totally get that — video fatigue is real, especially when it’s everywhere and often meaningless.

We’re not pushing video as a requirement — it’s just one option for people who want to show more personality or communicate things that don’t come across in text. Some folks prefer writing, some showcase projects or code — all of that works on OpenSpot.

The idea is to give people more ways to be seen for who they are, not force everyone into the same format.

The reason I hate LinkedIn is because I haven't had one straightforward career path. I rewrite my resume to tailor it to whatever I'm applying to next, which generally means removing all the descriptions of each of my old jobs and updating them with the tailored version every time I apply somewhere.

I don't really think there's a way to fix that, because I don't think there are enough of us (or enough people looking to hire us) to build a substantial userbase.

I just want to highlight it as one of the reasons some people hate LinkedIn, which has nothing to do with spammy feeds or influencers.

Having both a hardware and software background and applying to both fields, I have the same problem. The UI needs a lot of help (sidebar needs to go), but I've been building this https://thebestresumewebsite.com/ to combat this issue. Basically, you can write a bunch of bullet points, then checkbox which ones you want for different variations, so you don't have to keep deleting bullet points!

I like the idea! Mine aren't remotely as closely connected as software and hardware, though. Think more like social work and catering and property management and helping people secure their own bitcoin.

I can make a case that I can do just about anything that sounds interesting to me. It just really does end up needing to be custom every time!

It does sort of make me wonder if I could compile an outrageously detailed list of everything I've done in past roles and feed it to an AI to sort out how to frame things based on job description.

I tried this years ago. Some advice: target your marketing and product at “beautiful+easy portfolio” to start. See if you can make something beautiful people want to share, and when other people see one they want to create their own.

You can’t compete against LinkedIn on network for now, and many years to come. So need to talk about the now value. But try to build in network effects (tag who you worked with) as soon as you manage to crack growth.

Or ignore me. My version didn’t work!

This is really good advice — thank you for sharing it, especially with the honesty about your own attempt.

Totally agree: we're not trying to compete with LinkedIn's network (yet). Our focus right now is exactly what you said — making it beautiful and dead simple to create a portfolio that feels personal, professional, and worth sharing. Something that makes people say: “I want one of those.”

We’ve got network effects on the roadmap too — things like tagging collaborators, showcasing teams, and making intros more fluid — but only once we’ve nailed the individual value first.

Appreciate you taking the time

Best of luck. I've been wanting to build this for 2 years but don't have the time or passion available to do it justice.

My goals overlap a lot.

If you haven't seen https://huntr.co I think they do a great job helping you manage job hunting.

I think the social feed is LinkedIn's weakness as well. It creates a bad incentive for the company. I would use it a lot more if the feed was useful instead of fake engagement bait. Same with LinkedIn Learning being more about basic entry level courses than quality expert content.

My suggestion is to help people build valuable networks that discuss actual hard topics. I've seen a few companies try to create small exclusive groups that cost money to join but they try to guarantee meaningful, intelligent discussions & sharing. LinkedIn once tried to limit your network, which I still think was the right way to run it.

A popular marketing technique is to be the "Anti" company. I hope you can pull off the Anti-LinkedIn. The copywriting for that should write itself.

One more aside on recruiting. LinkedIn's infamous for terrible recruiters trying to fill quotas it seems. I don't know if recruiters need limits on messaging people or some type of ranking system.

Wow — thank you for this. You totally get the pain we’re trying to solve, and I really appreciate the encouragement

Funny enough, “The Anti-LinkedIn” has come up more than once during this launch - and I agree, the copy kind of writes itself when people feel the same pain.

Also +1 on Huntr — great tool! We’re focused more on visibility and standing out before the apply button, but I think they complement each other well.

You nailed something really important: the real opportunity is to create networks with actual signal — thoughtful discussions, deep expertise, and real connection. Not the dopamine feed. We’re starting super lightweight, but that’s absolutely part of the long-term vision.

And yeah… LinkedIn Learning + random recruiter spam + engagement farming = what pushed us to build this in the first place. Thanks again for taking the time — would love to stay in touch as we build.

I'll have to wait til later but I think this is a great idea and needs to be done. I think it's somewhat of an embarrassment to us all that LinkedIn is the current de facto place for our professional presence.

you nailed it!

LinkedIn has become Facebook Pro.

In fairness, we did get r/LinkedInLunatics out of LinkedIn, and I thoroughly enjoy that.

> r/LinkedInLunatics

Ha, hadn't heard of it. I'll have to take a peak for sure...

It's not about the platform itself, it's the users.

Am I going to be able to find new customers on this platform, consistently, like I do in LinkedIn? If not, why would I spend the X number of hours I have dedicated this month to finding new clients on this platform?

If you can Crack this nut you will have no problem finding users.

When LinkedIn originally started, it wasn't about "finding new customers on the platform", and I for one would be more than happy if another site decided not to support that as a primary use case.

At least when I joined, LinkedIn was about connecting to your respected colleagues, so that in the future if you needed help from your network (a job, info about a product, but perhaps most importantly, a 2nd-level introduction), then you could ask for it.

I'm perhaps a dying breed but I still only connect to LinkedIn people that I either have worked with or know at more than a passing level. I make strong use of the "I don't know this person" when I receive unsolicited invites.

That's where they make their money though.

In my view you are missing out on a huge part of the value, and a lot of career opportunities by not using it to meet new people who share your field, vision and passion for your work. It's like listening to the same songs over and over and never doing any music discovery. It's not so "salesy", it's more about expanding your network beyond people you already know. This isn't something to eliminate, this is the whole value of the platform. Otherwise it's just a glorified mass text.

There are ways to do that in paces with a way better signal to noise ratio. Especially if I care about local connections in my area. (Meetups, local communities, etc)

It's funny, it's the exact opposite for me.

I can go to a dozen local meetups and not meet one heart transplant surgeon or CEO of an artificial heart company or other blood pumping medical device. Even major cities have only a handful and they are busy. There is very little chance of bumping into them at a local meetup. It's much more time efficient for us to connect in this way.

Anecdotally, I've seen its common in the bay area at least for folks to exchange linkedin qr codes right away when meeting new folks, like a business card.

The best place to meet heart transplant surgeons is at conferences

Not really, I've been to many. I've flown all over the world to attend them. ISHLT, ISRBP, ASAIO, etc. Attending them regularly for years was not nearly as effective as the techniques I've outlined above. That's what I'm trying to say, from personal experience.

Do you say so from personal experience?

So in the end, you are saying this is a networking app for people who want to network using apps less?

This is not my area, but will the surgeon really waste time at LinkedIn? I expect them to either work (doing surgery or administrative work) or relax at the golf course. For the CEO it is a bit different, doing marketing maybe part of their Job.

However in both cases I expect an assistant etc to be at a conference, who then can introduce me. Which immediately is more personal than one in a million messages on LinkedIn.

But again, not my field.

>but will the surgeon really waste time at LinkedIn?

Depends on the person. But I'm sure the most conscientious ones will be the people making those "viral" posts that makes them connections. a potentially pompous surgeon is more than no surgeon if your goal is meeting likeminded connections.

>in both cases I expect an assistant etc to be at a conference, who then can introduce me.

sure, a conference which may not be in your area (so add in time and money to travel), potentially in certain areas needing a higher level pass (so more money). It's effective, but not potentially accessible. As well as rare; unless you have plenty of travel time you may only get to go to a few conferences a year. And even with all that a deep connection is not guaranteed.

Just a casual comment: I kept thinking the URL said "Honeypot", so I was a little worried I was clinking a dangerous link.

I thought it is just me of being paranoid, but I think it'll be much better to change the domain name for more commercial and professional one.

But again I also think that LinkedIn is a childish name, and is not commercial and professional as well.

Please be prepared for the onslaught of spam, SEO, porn that is most definitely going to happen.

I wish you luck.

To clarify: OpenSpot doesn’t have a feed, followers, or any social mechanics. There’s no algorithm pushing content or encouraging endless posting.

Exclude every search engine?

Then what does "curated platform" mean, exactly?

The user curates their profiles?

Its not about the product or features any more - LinkedIn wins because of its network.

This! It always nice to get the 101st message from random recruiter that ends up in a decent job. And I must only keep my profile updated.

that's fair. on the other hand, i'd rather use a platform with higher quality people (regardless of quantity) than a platform that simply values vanity metrics. i guess it also depends what you're using linkedin for.

These days, LinkedIn may be ruining that network because of the sheer noise in it all.

LinkedIn has definitely gotten worse but your solution seems too social to me, a more sober version of LinkedIn would be enough Thanks

Tbh all LinkedIn could do is get rid of the feed and I would be happy.

I don't want to film myself. I don't want to upload my photos online. My work should do the talking.

In fact, your platform is broken, since its focus on visual selling is the same bias as having photos on a resume. So you are not improving over LinkedIn.

Make a primarily text only platform, and visual showcase should only be of things you have done. All non-objective things should be removed. Then make hooks for applying to jobs so everything gets filled in one click.

Well, no offense to you and I don't question your sentiment nor caution, but your comment has the connotation of the infamous Dropbox comment[0], and even the beginnings of YouTube (which started as a personal vlog / dating site, IIRC).

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224

I wish them the best of luck!

The thing is, those "famous comments" are a form of survivorship bias.

"People are saying Google Glass was silly, sounds like a dropbox comment, surely it'll become the next big thing"

"People are saying the Humane AI Pin is useless, you can just use your phone, sounds like the dropbox comment lol"

"People criticized ScamCoin5000 saying 'just do a regular ponzi scheme with cash lol', people also said 'just use ftp' about dropbox, so surely ScamCoin5000 will be the biggest thing since sliced bread"

It's a frustrating thought-terminating cliché, and I'm really tired of hearing it at this point. "The internet started small, so that means the crypto/our ICO/NFTs/metaverse/AI is also just at the beginning but will become huge", uh huh, sure.

To quote Carl Sagan, on an older form of this phenomenon: “But the fact that some geniuses were laughed at does not imply that all who are laughed at are geniuses. They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown.”

Though tbh I might take Bozo over Columbus.

There's some definite survivorship bias for this, lol. If OP put it on TikTok, Instagram, or some other video-first platform, it might gone better than a website which still doesn't use profile pictures.

I really, really don't want to this to become the norm.

Op has made a nice looking site - but I absolutely hate the idea of having to film myself.

It's also worth remembering peoples biases (to be plain racism and sexism); many studies show that these level out when you remove the need for people to have names on their job applications.

By having videos you are going to turbo charge this.

Sorry op, but this this is a hard no. This kind of site should be text only.

> In fact, your platform is broken, since its focus on visual selling is the same bias as having photos on a resume.

I guess it helps the conventionally attractive people, because from their perspective they're suddenly doing better thanks to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halo_effect

Not entirely unlike someone having a "personal brand", a following on social media, some content that they create on YouTube or wherever, vs someone who just has a document with some impressive sounding projects within past orgs.

I feel like any LinkedIn alternative is doomed to end the same way. Because most of its problems come from corporate culture itself.

It might. But it might make the founder rich en route to that doom.

As far as being doomed, you could easily be right. But couldn't the same case be made that HN would just be as bad as any other forum or comment section and therefore not worth doing?

That was my first thought as well.

Supposing this project gets off the ground, maybe even somehow surpasses linkedin, some investor will come along, flash a big pile of cash at the owner and bam, through various monetization strategies to make back that money, you end up back at linkedin.

Linkedin isn't the way it is because they didn't know how to make good UI.

> with video, audio, and proof of your work

No text, I see. It's so last century.

> No endless feeds. No humblebrags. Just real people open to new opportunities.

Question is: when the people from Linkedin come to your site, won't they post the same crap as they do on Linkedin?

the trick on linkedin is simply to 'unfollow' everyone so you don't see their inane posts / cries for attention.

I'd guess that your platform will inevitably contain the same dross. LinkedIn Lunatics are probably platform agnostic.

Definitely a good tip to unfollow everyone.

I'd guess that LinkedIn Lunatics are only there because LinkedIn incentivizes that behavior by boosting that type of slop. I heard an anecdote that clicking the "show more" would count as engagement on a post, causing linkedin to show it to more people. Thus began the single-line-separated-by-spaces trend. Comments probably count as engagement too, which would explain why influencers end everything with "thoughts?" or "agree?" lmao

Somewhat related: the worst linkedin post I've ever seen was a woman, who I'll call Kelsey R, sharing an image with a caption like "So inspirational, just what I needed to get through the day!" The image was a screenshot of a poem, signed by Kelsey R.

then there's the supposed trick where you don't post a link in the OP, but rather the post is "in the comments" cos the algo [apparently] doesn't like outlinks i suppose, to keep thee inside the walled garden

There are three parts to linkedin;

(1) the user facing feeds, the social media part most people see

(2) the recruiter platform that recruiters are addicted to, and the integrations with other platforms to this bit.

(3) the advertising platform that marketers/employer brand teams can run paid targeted advertising at prospects etc.

This will fail like every similar thing because Linkedin has the market sewn up from every angle. There's a reason Microsoft paid 26 billion for it.

My advice to anyone, get yourself on LinkedIn, fill out your profile as much as your can, join the relevant groups in the industry you are in, network in real life.

Works only in the US. Worth mentioning.

yea you are right, we are working very hard on expanding to more countries. Feel free to sign up on our waitlist to get notified as soon as we launch in your area :D

We should build some sort of global network where all websites would be accessible to everyone. It would be an interconnection of networks, we could call it Inter-net.

Legal compliance. For example the UK just enacted a law making hosts responsible for forum content so any site with user content now has one more risk to think about.

how does that work? i am looking for remote jobs globally. well, where it makes sense timezone wise, but still, i am not just looking for jobs in my area. some american companies may also be looking for people in other areas.

also what if you get the area wrong? the site is not telling me which area it detected for me. i am traveling a lot and i am often not in the area where i actually live. i hesitate to sign up and find out that i get notified for an area that i am no longer in or was never interested in finding jobs in to begin with.

for any area specific features, if you open up signing up to anyone with the caveat that if they are not in a supported area they may not benefit from the site, then you could use the popularity of sign-ups as a suggestion where to focus on next.

I just wanted to ask if you're EU based but this answers it I guess.

Your platform would be illegal in my country, because it gives employers ways to discriminate (on physical appearance and sex, in particular).

Is LinkedIn illegal in your country?

Good point; it isn’t! What’s illegal is for people to discriminate based on names and photos, but the platform itself is fine.

Ah, another tech solution to a social cold start problem.

LinkedIn's value is that everyone is on it. Even super secretive Apple employees - Apple couldn't force them to delete their stuff. Talk about a powerful network effect. Just start browsing, see for yourself: https://www.linkedin.com/company/apple/people/

LI's value is not in the UI, not in the features. Just like FB, YT, WhatsApp, etc - they took off while no one else did, not because better tech, but by hitting a virality inflection point.

This is a hard problem to solve, people like Nikita Bier are the equivalent to rocket scientists in that area. And while they can launch a viral app for teenagers, the "easiest" early adopter group, repeatedly and flip it for cash - they can't figure out how to crack LinkedIn.

Think of it as a virus/pandemic problem. Who are the super spreaders that pull in the rest of the normies? What is the initial value for THEM to join in the first place? I can tell you that a special social network for Doctors, publicly listed now, had to give their initial cohort of docs STOCK in the company to be on the platform. Talk about dilution...

So, sorry, forget about the shiny UI. How do you infect and take over the LinkedIn host? They fight scraping left and right.

Personally I am so happy to work in enterprise SaaS...so much easier than the above :)

Couldn’t agree more — this is definitely a cold start + network effects problem at its core. We’re under no illusion that we can out-network LinkedIn by being shinier or faster.

You nailed it: their true moat isn’t tech, it’s scale and inertia. Everyone’s on it, even if they hate it. That’s what makes it both frustrating and interesting to challenge — not because it's easy, but because it’s overdue.

We’re not trying to beat LinkedIn at their own game (at least not yet) — we’re focused on solving one painful wedge: helping people actually stand out and get discovered without shouting into a noisy feed or spraying cold applications into the void.

If we can win on that one slice of user need (especially among early-career folks, designers, PMs, indie hackers, etc.), we believe there’s room to build up a meaningful alternative, piece by piece. Small, high-signal networks that grow from the edge rather than trying to eat the core from day one.

Appreciate the thoughtful challenge — these are exactly the conversations that keep us grounded and ambitious at the same time.

This doesn’t solve the problem with LinkedIn.

One problem with LinkedIn to find jobs is that every job applicstion gets hundreds of applications. Your site won’t have any jobs available - that’s the opposite problem.

I have looked for and found jobs 7x since 2012 when I joined LinkedIn. Two of those jobs came from my reaching out to recruiters who posted jobs that I was somewhat uniquely qualified for. Those people won’t be on your site.

The other two were from recruiters reaching out to me based on a search on skills. Those people won’t be on your site either.

Not to mention that when I’m looking to find out about my interviewers, manager etc, I’m not looking on your site either, neither are they looking for me there.

A large part of my profile is also recommendations.

What problem are you trying to solve?

this. 100%. LinkedIn's value is not on resumes too or people looking for jobs. But for Sales - hence why Microsoft paid 26bn. If you're sales person, recruiter etc trying to find people or business. LinkedIn has no competition.

When I click the sign up from the front page, it takes me to a login page that says my credentials are invalid. Then I see another sign-up link.

If I click sign up from the front page just take me straight to the sign-up page.

Looks nice.

Immediate feedback:

- The mobile v. desktop detection seems based on the screen width, which would be reasonable if it didn't mean halting my onboarding process because my browser window ain't maximized.

- The auto-generated profile didn't capture much from my résumé or LinkedIn profile. Only the two most recent roles plus some early-career freelance work; that covers maybe 20% or so of my overall career.

- Related to the above, it'd be useful to have more control over the (what appears to be) AI-generated summarizations of things.

- No way to reorder the "key accomplishments"?

- A place to list certifications and (in my case) clearances would be handy.

Really appreciate the detailed feedback — this is super helpful!

While we are still super early and the platform you are seeing is our MVP, you're absolutely right on all points, and we've already added everything you mentioned to our backlog. We're now working on improving the resume/LinkedIn import, giving users more control over summaries and ordering, and adding fields for certifications and clearances.

Also, great catch on the viewport detection — we'll tweak that so it doesn’t block onboarding just because your browser window isn’t full screen. Thanks again for taking the time to test it and share your thoughts

I'm on a OnePlus 12 and the site seems too wide / off center with some of the first button off screen.

Cool.

I use linkedin and pay for premium but the problem it solves for me is very different. If I want to find out how to reach an organisation to do sales, I need to know the structure of the organization and who I know that knows people who work there. I don't even use the linkedin-platform messaging. Really it's about how to coordinate my rolodex so I can get warm introductions.

I have posted a few jobs on linkedin and they immediately get 1000s of applicants, with very poor signal-to-noise ratio. We don't use it for job postings anymore, we instead do more specific targeting.

100% and that’s exactly the kind of feedback we’ve heard from users too.

LinkedIn still works for networking or sales in some cases, but when it comes to job searching and hiring, it’s become almost unusable. The signal-to-noise ratio is brutal, especially for job posts, and candidates feel like they’re just shouting into the void.

>We’ve already onboarded a few companies....with other standout folks and supercharge your network.

As soon as I read 'onboarded', and 'supercharge your network', I gave up (being young[er], I guess).

There's a lot of correct feedback about why this is not an amazing start for something starting as a marketplace for talent.

This could be a beautiful start for a Linkedin alternative focused on freelancers, entrepreneurs, etc. Maybe even people in specific industries whose Linkedin currently does more than get them their next job (sales comes to mind, but also folks who work at design agencies and need to get clients, and have a profile they attach somewhere in the about us section).

I wish you the best in this endeavor, but what made LinkedIn suck wasn't anything to do with LinkedIn and everything to do with becoming a social network that businesses could use to substitute for good old-fashion contact-finding. This damaged it in two ways: people started bending their accounts to be more (or less, because the spam problem is real!) attractive, and businesses started shotgunning recruiting info far past where it would be useful to the recipient.

If your experiment takes off, I don't know how it avoids the same fate.

Linked in is a mess, for sure. What I liked from it was verified identities. SoftwareDev-land could maybe make something that was Git backed, extensive and allow for secondary evaluation of the claims made - https://gist.github.com/paul-hammant/3375fec8e204f0c7567d4da.... Perhaps tossing out privacy as it does so :(

I personally like Linkedin - it's so trashy that it makes me work harder to retire early to get away from all those crazy prople. Or at least to close the tab ASAP.

i'd pay for linkedin premium if they marketed their platform like this

You lost me as soon as I saw users can create content.

All platforms become bad as soon as you allow average Joe speak his mind.

The only ones that somewhat save themselves are the likes of HN and Reddit where it's all about discussing, but users are mostly anonymous and not trying to promote their brand.

Totally hear you and I agree that most platforms go downhill when the focus shifts to likes, followers, and constant posting.

To clarify: OpenSpot doesn’t have a feed, followers, or any social mechanics. There’s no algorithm pushing content or encouraging endless posting. When we say “create content,” we mean things like a short video intro, showcasing past work, or writing a quick blurb about what makes you unique — all on your profile, not for public engagement farming.

> all on your profile, not for public engagement farming.

The spammers, the SEO farmers, the porn merchants won't care.

A link is a link.

I've been tackling spam for 15+ years and you will get hit. I wish it were not the case, but it is. Expect it.

The opposite of spam is machine-generated content. All platforms have it, at least to pretend the platform is not empty at the beginning.

> The opposite of spam is machine-generated content.

Spam is not machine-generated content?

You might be interested in my next start-up; hand crafted, bespoke and artisanal spam as a service.

I think you got it wrong. There isn't a feed that people can see when they log in. There's just profile pages, like walls on Facebook. Someone can see your content if they go to your wall, but they won't be fed your content. At least that's what I think this concept is.

If it is so, I don't see the problem with that. Sure, you'll have the fake-happy and fake-positive content, but they'll not be force fed to you.

Yes, he will get hit. At the same time, it's not at all the same problem as algorithmic engagement. If someone puts up a spam page that I never see, I don't care that much. There are also some technical things he can do to reduce e.g. the SEO value of any content that is posted on the site like nofollow.

>nofollow

Most links are nofollow these days. Those still provide SEO value. Google will find your site very suspicious if your dofollow to nofollow ratio is too high.

There is always an algorithm, explicit or not, "malicious" or not.

For implicit algorithms, outside of the issues/misincentives of time-sorted feeds, there's also game theory and behavioral economics.

Do you think that there is form of communication where you reach a higher understanding? Are we average Joes on HN?

> All platforms become bad as soon as you allow average Joe speak his mind.

Hard disagree on that one. Average Joe is perfectly fine.

But I strongly agree on professional platforms allowing users to create content being an incredibly bad idea.

A possibility turns into an obligation for success real quick. I have just about 0 interest in creating 10 posts per day to game some algorithm into promoting me. And neither would I like hiring someone who spends 80% of his time awake trying to game some algorithm into enlongating his job title.

Yep and that’s exactly what we’re trying to avoid.

Openspot has no algorithm, no feed, and no pressure to post daily. It’s not about creating content for engagement — it’s about helping people show their real value in a more human way than a PDF resume or a keyword-stuffed LinkedIn profile.

You don’t need to “game” anything — a short video intro, a demo of your work, or just a few lines about what you’re great at is often enough to stand out. That’s the whole point: quality signals over content farming.

> All platforms become bad as soon as you allow average Joe speak his mind.

I do not think that is the big problem. The problem is what platforms promote: content that creates engagement.

Hard to argue against engagment being good overall, but I think we need some kind of "regularization".

You said two conflicting things. HN and reddit is average Joe speaking their mind. The problem is not the average Joe, but the influencer culture where users are incentivised to increase their numbers.

You lost me when you said Reddit is a positive example of social media.

It used to be, but that ship has sailed a long time ago.

I guess he’d consider Medium to be a behavioral sink too. (I had to facepalm when some guy told me I had to get on Medium because it was so amazing he got 70 views on an article, I had to break it to him that I thought 50,000 views was a lot of views [1])

[1] I accomplished that for the first time by writing a news article about an event a few months before it happened.

It depends on the subreddit. Some are dumpster fires; others like r/woodworking are lovely.

> All platforms become bad as soon as you allow average Joe speak his mind

Perhaps not right when, but it becomes bad when you decide by yourself (or take advice from someone to pays you money) to show it to me.

What would be a good alternative? Who is going to create that content? Corporations? Media? I don't get it

> You lost me as soon as I saw users can create content.

It's a site for prospective employees/contractors. How do you expect someone to advertise themselves w/o creating any content? LinkedIn certainly allows user-created content.

Congrats on the launch. Another big annoyance of LinkedIn is that the UI performance feels sluggish on desktop. The app kills my battery on mobile.

Had a look at your site and the carousel seems to slow down the entire site for me. Scrolling becomes janky and it's a drag to scroll down. I'm using Firefox and also tried it in a chromium based browser.

The carousel itself also jumps to the beginning when it reaches the end, i.e. it's not a seamless loop.

thanks for the feedback, working on this now!!

Another problem is that you moved the scrollbar to the wrong side of the screen. I set Firefox to put it on the left, your site moves it to the right.

I would encourage you to just remove any custom scrolling code, it doesn't work well.

I'm not sure if Linkedin is actually that 'broken'. My LinkedIn-feed has always been worse that my Facebook-feed, but that is simply because the world of work has forced me to spend time with a small minority of terrible people whom I would normally avoid.

However, crucially, as a peer reviewed CV machine and recruiting platform, Linkedin is... fine. In fact its actually quite good.

LinkedIn as a "connect me to actual jobs" as of late has been horrible. But I'm not quite sure if this site has a big enough mass to solve such an issue.

To be honest unlike all other social media on Linkedin it's actually possible to curate your feed and platform dont interfere. Though it's only useful for those of us who have to follow industry news and events.

Being able to easily pick conversation starters is crucial and priceless for bizdev.

Thought it would be more "open"/federated/open-source. Honestly not interested in another platform like this.

While I wish you well, I guess my only question is what you complain about are cultural issues with linkedin which I don't think wouldn't happen on any other platform too. Is it because it is "curated?" Couldn't anyone game that kind of curation too and then eventually the site would devolve into the same fakeness that plagues linkedin?

Love your approach of video resumes. We share the same vision and recently built a flow for users to easily create a professional resume videos themselves. Our tech automates the entire process. Check it out and maybe we can partner https://www.takeone.video/resume-videos

Thank you - LinkedIn became extremely annoying over time. I'll check how it compares, when I'm hiring for my team.

thats awesome, looking forward to your feedback! feel free to join our discord so we can keep in touch

LinkedIn even has Tiktok like videos (near misses, etc.). Every time I see those, I just wonder "why"?

100%, they are clearly hopping onto a trend with no meaningful connection back to their platform.

Maybe it is driven by how people are increasingly using it. There is a lot more political content now for example.

Sounds what people ar looking for is a "professionals only" feed where average Joe has nothing to say. I honestly don't know enough about social media to say whether that's realistic. All i can think about is YouTube Community but with a set limit of subs/views

That’s a really interesting take — and I think you're onto something. A lot of the frustration comes from signal getting drowned out by noise, especially when everyone's trying to "perform" professionally.

With OpenSpot, we decided to skip the feed entirely. Instead of trying to fix the feed, we just removed it. No likes, no endless scrolling, no performance metrics — just individual profiles curated around quality signals.

It’s not about restricting average Joe, but about giving real talent — whether loud or quiet — a space to be discovered for what they do, not how often they post.

Why couldn't we have something decentralised there too? Like blogs/RSS or AT proto, but for CVs and networking? Some kind of protocol on top of micro formats?

That still works with LinkedIn (at least in one way, as it's obvious LinkedIn won't ever reciprocate).

Exactly what I have been brainstorming a couple of times recently. I think it's a really cool idea, although I wouldn't know why anybody would want to switch? It would probably become rather niche (which is possibly even for the best). And if a critical mass switches over, what would prevent it from having the same kind of people and behaviour?

That being said I would be absolutely down to go down that rabbithole.

> why anybody would want to switch?

Why would a Twitter user switch to Mastodon or Bluesky or micro blogging, either on a shared public instance or on a personal instance?

Why would anyone think of making a new Twitter or a new LinkedIn in 2015? (actually, it's not new, it's different because of the different premise: not a single private platform controlled by whoever owns it, but several cooperating platforms through a common protocol).

Why would a Ford driver switch to a bicycle? Because while the infrastructure has not adjusted yet, it's a more sustainable, human-sized, city/neighbourhood-sized transportation tool (which, while it does not cover 100% of the cases, depending on the situation, can cover 50/80% of those), and it gives, not more power (that's irrelevant) but much more direct control about what you can do with it, where you can go.

So in short: it cannot start differently than as a niche thing.

> if a critical mass switches over, what would prevent it from having the same kind of people and behaviour?

Hosting instances policies and moderation. Much like Mastodon does already.

The actual value/service of LinkedIn is not in the data they have (it could be as well stored in a distributed database, such as the open web could be understood as). It's in how they operate/categorize/filter/report over it (their algorithms), and how they brand under their authority (which some take as some guarantee, which they are even happy to pay to).

You managed to make a web app in 2025 that has almost no HTML semantics and almost no keyboard accessibility (so very clearly and deeply not WCAG-conformant). Gosh, I haven't seen that in quite a while. Mind sharing which tools you used to make it?

Your About page doesn't work. I'd not share personal information with an anonymous company.

Isn’t the point of sharing the info so that it would be public?

That is not related to the comment from opp. Their comment was that the company hosting this site does not say who they are, where incorporated etc.

Currently experience lists based on start date, which is usually a good indicator. But anything that has an end date of "Present" should probably be bubbled to the top of the list. Or at least the users should be able to pick the order.

It's all about network effects.

I don't care about recruiters. Don't need a job. With the demise of Twitter and Facebook not being interesting for professional purposes, LinkedIn is just the best medium for professional outreach.

It's just a good way to reach professional contacts.

Read.cv was the only professional networking website that I enjoyed using (and many others too). It was authentic, unpretentious, and without gimmicks. If anyone wants to make something similar, look at what they did for inspiration.

Looks slick but your call to action is off; No one wants "more interviews" they want a job! So don't advertise that your product will lead to more interviews, advertise that it will lead to a job.

Got a message saying you're working hard on creating a mobile experience in the meantime to try desktop. But when I put it into desktop mode from brave on my pixel, it still gave me the same message.

its based on screen width, thats why!

I wish I could tag filter and control what I see on my feed for example political content on LinkedIn is largely an unfollow event for me. Also I’d like to be able to filter for recruiter content and just jobs.

The real problem is that a professional network is just kinda boring.

If you replicate that aspect of LinkedIn then not much is achieved.

The real opportunity is to create a trust network for granting access to send email.

It looks interesting for sure. Sadly, LinkedIn is going to be relevant for quiet a long time still, just because of how many people and companies are there. Ill give your site a try.

Feedback:

I'd really like to be able to some some sample profiles from users before I decide to sign up and commit to anything at all.

The problem with resume sites is that you only need them for a short period every X years in those months you're looking for a job. Then you never touch it again. The social features of Linkein, as awful as they are, keep users engaged and active regularly even while they are employed.

Lots of people pooping all over the video feature but I think it's a pretty decent idea. Especially for roles where spoken communication is a key requirement (community, DevRel, etc). I could see it having unintended consequences though. I suppose it is something you can change your mind about later and remove.

My only advice is to make it selective--i.e., you need to apply to get your profile on it. That's the only way you will break LinkedIn's network effects.

It’s a lot of fonts. Looks like similar design as runway ml. A site to help people stand out that fails to stand out. Looks very clean and tidy though.

Whew, I was hoping there’d be a second LinkedIn at some point. Surely it will not be very quickly ruined by influencers like everything else, ever.

> So I built OpenSpot: a public, curated platform where you can showcase who you are — with video, audio, and proof of your work. No endless feeds. No humblebrags. Just real people open to new opportunities

You can already do this in many places and it still will be more noise than signal.

This pitch seems more aimed at solving a want from the type of companies that want a one way interview (film yourself telling us who you are) to save on resources than anything else.

It's even worse when you consider that in the word of LLMs they'll still want to parse those automatically into recommendation and filter systems.

I don't think you'll really love our thoughts. Heh.

Really like your vision. The “no endless feeds, no humblebrags, just real people” pitch really resonates.

LinkedIn feels exhausting, so I’m definitely going to give OpenSpot a try.

Wishing you the best

The idea of making your profile feel more like a personal pitch makes a ton of sense. Honestly surprised something like this doesn’t already exist at scale.

agreed. insane how all platform profiles just replicate the resume format (which also warrants another discussion)

https://peerlist.io is a good contender too. Have you folks tried it?

it looks great!

LinkedIn is owned by Microsoft and is now integrated into Outlook and Office. It might suck, but it has VAST reach.

I hate it. That is my first impression and I'm sticking to it. Ugly, soul-less, modern design typified by giant typography, dark mode, huge blank spaces, and an annoying video of the person shilling themself. I hate the name as well. "Hey" is not a polite greeting. It hope this fails tremendously. What a waste of time.

> soul-less, modern design

What happened to UX as of late? We have buttons that look like labels and you can no longer tell what's actionable anymore.

Is it "modern" or confusing?

> "Hey" is not a polite greeting.

> I hope this fails tremendously. What a waste of time.

Now, which is more polite? A common greeting, or wishing failure on someone who wanted to showcase their web design skills?

I cant with this man. How did you not realize that my offhand comment on a web board doesn't call for the same level of politeness as the front page of a platform for professionals.

And to characterize it as "wanted to showcase their web design skills". Its a startup.

I don't feel like I'm a smart guy but damn are you stupid.

I understand (and even agree to) the general sentiment, but it seems there would be a more constructive way to express this.

Looks like Linkedin with a new CSS

Your landing page is extremely slow and laggy on Safari on my Mac Mini for some reason.

Nice project! Curious to know what stack you're using for the analytics?

there was a better LinkedIn, it was called Read.cv. unfortunately, they've been bought by Perplexity (which is a shame because Read.cv is a perfect product while Perplexity is snake oil)

interesting take, what made it a perfect product in your opinion ? as opposed to linkedin / OP's product

Don't tell us that you built a better LinkedIn. Tell us how you will remain a better one if you ever become successful.

LinkedIn was (arguably) a better place too before its unavoidable enshittification. How are you different? How will you remain more principled? How will you prevent the issues (say, the existence of "influencers") that turned LinkedIn into the awful place that it is today, especially if you get funded by some VC in the future?

Why not use the AT Protocol like bluesky? (assuming you don't)

I like the idea of blending a portfolio-style showcase with some kind of network on top. Consider how to maintain meaningful engagement without falling into the same pitfalls as existing social media.

Some ideas:

Avoid Engagement for Engagement’s Sake – Features like posting and analytics can create the same inauthentic cycles seen on other platforms, where users engage primarily to boost metrics and reach rather than build genuine connections.

Encourage Thoughtful Interaction – Consider placing limits on outreach, such as allowing only one new direct message per day. This ensures that when someone reaches out, it’s intentional and meaningful, not spam.

Resist Monetisation Pitfalls – Rather than introducing premium features like LinkedIn’s paywalls or sponsored content, a fair enterprise model such as paid job postings section could sustain the platform without diluting its core value.

Your approach is promising, and with the right focus, OpenSpot could offer a genuinely valuable alternative. Best of luck!

I'm in EU, sad it's not available there.

I'm fed up with LinkedIn

the future where you have to be a micro-influencer and sell (to use the diplomatic word) yourself out on social media to land a job is a dystopian one.

It would be great to see this add ActivityPub.

Ill check it out.

I agree "LinkedIn sucks".

What is your stance on privacy?

Honestly seems like it would be better to build a browser extension that makes LI livable, rather than trying to david-and-goliath them. Taking them on is unlikely to succeed, and even though you'll have to adapt the extension as their site changes, you'll be able to get some passionate fans who use your tool.

I can see this pivoting into YouTube 2.0

Isn't Nebula very close to YouTube 2.0? Or if one is ok not having algorithmic recommendations/curation then peer tube <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43403377> is surely better than centralized

flashy and gimmicky, actually I'd rather use linkedin

LinkedIn is not just only for jobs, it's also about networking

Xing just exists.

Only in the U.S: Network is everything, it doesn't have to be 88% market share. But if it is 0.01%, and limited to 4% of the geo population, good luck. Open up to 200 countries, people can't even sign up while on a trip oversea.

Honestly, this looks really cool. LinkedIn has become almost unusable for actually finding interesting people or jobs.

thanks a lot, really appreciate the feedback! thanks for signing up!

This is dope!

Eh, my impression this looks like Figma or a design tool. not a social network

LinkedIn was created basically for headhunters to pay to contact people and search. That's why it's such junk. It's there to trap "candidates" with an endless feed of dreck, long enough to get headhunters interested in paying to spam them.

We, the candidates, don't need a place to "stand out", like an Instagram for Jobs. We shouldn't be "making content" at all. Nobody should have to create a multimedia presentation to get a job interview.

My own department at work has been working for months to try to find a candidate for a couple positions. Yet there's supposedly so many people out of work? Either everyone out of work is terrible, or the way we find and filter candidates is terrible. I think it's the latter. And I think it's time for an engineering approach. No more bullshit resumes, bullshit headhunters, and bullshit social media. Let's solve this problem, once and for all.

What I think we need, is fine-grained, data-informed, weighted and sorted matching. Show me the people/companies who match what I'm looking for, and sort them based on my criteria.

For candidates:

  - How do you do your best work? (select an option, with weighting)
  - How many years have you practiced trunk-based development? (select an option, with weighting)
  - How much experience do you have with X framework? (select an option, with weighting)
  - How many years experience to you have working with blockchain technologies? (select an option, with weighting)

For employers:

  - How much do performance reviews affect merit increase or bonus? (select an option, with weighting)
  - How much vacation time do you offer? (select an option, with weighting)
  - What kind of presence do you require? (select an option, with weighting)
  - Does your engineering department have thorough on-call documentation? (select an option, with weighting)

We work in technology. We make this stuff for a living. But nobody's made a simple site to actually filter on this stuff? There's a dozen dating sites that do it. But none for jobs? Despite the fact that we all complain all the time about how hard it is to find jobs, and candidates?

You may not like the examples above, but they're not the point. The point is that we all have questions we'd like to ask, either way. We'd all like to cut out all the BS, like having to tailor all your life's work down to 2 pages of one-line snippets. We'd all like to cut through candidates who won't match our company's culture. And we shouldn't have to read a bunch of 2-page summaries that don't really tell us anything, only to then have a dozen 30-minute calls just to tell us what could have been in an e-mail.

> supercharge

kthxbye

Thank. You. For. This. `\o/` LinkedIn is a cess pit. (see r/linkedinlunatics)

I apologize this is not directly related to OP, but if you, like myself, get mad at all the "Suggested" posts LinkedIn is pushing on you, you can use the following ublock filter to get rid of these posts:

    www.linkedin.com##:xpath(//span[text()="Suggested"]//ancestor::div/div[contains(@data-id, "activity")])

Combined with carefully managing who I actually follow, it made it for a much more pleasant experience.

Thank you this makes it so much better!

here's my cosmetic filter:

  www.linkedin.com##.scaffold-finite-scroll--infinite.scaffold-finite-scroll:matches-path(/feed)
  www.linkedin.com##.feed-follows-module:matches-path(/feed)
  www.linkedin.com##div.mb2 > .artdeco-card

my problem with the wall isn't like with youtube where it's distracting and inviting to waste my time. it's more that most of the posts are so utterly dumb and self-aggrandising that it just makes me angry. thank god for ublock.

This is great!

Yes I get mad at these posts, and then even madder at me for scrolling through the feed in the first place. But this is great, thanks!

Another option is Settings & Privacy > Preferred Feed View > Most recent posts.

thank you.

Anyone remember polywork.com ?

Their tagline was "Your professional network"

They closed in early 2025

LinkedIn may suck.

Let me retract that.

It definitely sucks (For me - it sucks because of non-professional posts in the feed. memes, political rants, funny pics etc.)

But there are good parts as well.

The most important thing going on for them is they have network effect.

Everyone (and their grandma, as they say) is on LinkedIn

When I was interviewing, I used to check the LinkedIn profile for the candidate as well. (Lot of times, after the interview in case I had good things to say in my feedback form)

Having said that - Best wishes to OpenSpot.

The network effect is strong, but it’s not unbeatable.

History has shown that new social platforms can thrive despite the “everyone is already there” argument—Facebook vs MySpace, Insta, TikTok et al.

I can’t predict how openspot will turn out, but I hope it or anything else doesn’t get caught up in the network effect narrative.

The network effect also works in reverse. The collapse of a network can happen very quickly. Facebook wasn't just functionally better than Myspace. Myspace experienced two really bad things at once, uncontrolled spam and adding display ads, at the same time, in 2008. It was easy to get users to just lose their daily Myspace habit and replace it with Facebook.

LinkedIn is unlikely to be mismanaged as poorly as Myspace was but there will be openings for competitors. Myspace and Facebook were unique because they were both very interchangable at that point, although Myspace was kind of like the "public" internet while Facebook had already dropped the edu email requirement, it was still heavily skewed college educated at that point.

Also worth pointing out, the edu email addresses requirement for Facebook likely did a lot for keeping their early network clean of bots and spam at a minimum cost. LinkedIn, on the other hand, basically hijacked their user's address books and sent out email impersonating those users, meanwhile ignoring unsubscribe requests and spam complaints. Which certainly sounds like something someone would end up in jail for doing (they did get in trouble for this.)

Yep, pretty much this.

I worked on this problem for a couple years, with vastly more funding and an existing userbase to bypass the cold start problem. So did my predecessor. Neither of us succeeded, nor came particularly close. Here's what I wrote last year in a retrospective about how we failed (with a few things not relevant to this post trimmed):

> "LinkedIn For Engineers" - that was the by-phrase within Triplebyte for most of 2020 as we shifted into the Source era.

> Job searching on LinkedIn sucks! (True.) Engineers hate LinkedIn! (Often true.) So if we just make a LinkedIn that doesn't suck (uh-oh), everyone should want to use us instead!

> I present it here in a somewhat comedic tone, but this wasn't a ridiculous idea on the face of it. We didn't need to worry about the cold-start problem (because we already had a bunch of users on both sides of the hiring process) and we were competing against an incumbent people don't like. None of Triplebyte's leadership were stupid, and they didn’t pick that direction arbitrarily.

> Conventional wisdom, and wisdom within the company at the time, was that if you want to disrupt an incumbent, you need to be a step function better. The claim was that our skill assessments and our engineer-specific functions could accomplish that. And our assessments were very good. That part wasn't wrong.

> But the problem was that we couldn’t just be a step function better at something. That can work for a company just starting out (and in fact it’s standard advice for making a great startup), but we were a growth-stage Series B company with a nine-figure valuation. We needed to be a step function better at the core value proposition of our space. And the core value proposition of LinkedIn isn't "we make finding a job easy and pleasant". It’s "we have all the jobs and all the candidates".

> No one wanted another LinkedIn, because LinkedIn had already perfected its we-have-all-the-jobs-and-all-the-candidates value prop.

I'm not quite sure what OP thinks their step-function advantage is, either. It certainly looks nicer than LinkedIn, but if you're generating a profile from a resume, what does it add beyond resumes? Resumes that are already a de facto standard supported by every ATS in the Universe?

We had a UI with a bunch of nice displays and animations and such. No one used it - they all just used the PDF export. At my current company, I pretty much exclusively use linkedin's PDF export when viewing candidates there for the same reason.

Heh, gotta love HN -- we're all just musing, and in comes a founder of the biggest startup in this space to share their personal experience! Thanks for commenting, interesting stuff.

I think you hit the nail on the head with "LinkedIn had already perfected its value prop". We all hate the culture on the social media network hosted by LinkedIn, but the internet killed that kind of highly-social networking anyway for most corp jobs (in the US?), so it doesn't actually relate to their real value props:

1. surfacing people for searches by name or specific experiences,

2. connecting employees & employers, and

3. providing some informal identity verification.

None of those really rely on the slop that we've all been drawn into scrolling through every now-and-again, only to be horrified by how banal & insincere it all is.

Personally, my takeaway is that for OpenSpot to really compete, one huge (+ hugely challenging) opportunity would be to actually do professional social networking well, and thus add something LinkedIn doesn't have for most people. I was going to cynically say that Bluesky already (re-)solved this for people in academia, writing, and journalism, but it's now occurring to me that bsky's protocol means that network could be leveraged here, too...

Clarification: I was not one of Triplebyte's founders (I was in the leadership there later, but not to start). I founded my current company, which - while it deliberately uses a similar model in many respects - is its own distinct thing with none of the same IP, clients, etc.

> We all hate the culture on the social media network hosted by LinkedIn

Who is "we" here?

I work mostly with Bay Area companies and engineers looking for early-stage startups, about as HN-y a crowd as you could possibly hope for. A plurality of our candidates - about 30% - have come in from HN engagement.

But many people on both sides of that set still buy into the things people theoretically hate about linkedin. Status-jockeying is everywhere, and insecurity shows up on both sides all the time. Founders are alert for any signal that you don't consider them The Most Special Company To Ever Exist (because they see that as a sign you'll leave). Engineers are often eager to withdraw at the first sign a company might not be a rocketship (because they want a stable job). It's not everyone, but it still happens plenty.

I'm not blaming them. This is the correct self-interested strategy (within reason) for both sides. In a game of imperfect information, you try not to show when you have a bad hand, and you look to see if your opponent has one. Sometimes you bluff, and sometimes you call others' bluffs - and as long as everyone wants everyone else to stop lying first, this doesn't change. You can choose not to bluff (and I do) but you will be playing suboptimally if you do. And good bluffs don't look like bluffs - the stuff that you see as "banal and insincere" is just the people who suck at it.

As a personal example: a friend of mine came to me yesterday and asked me about a job offer he was considering from a founder I'd met before. I hadn't been impressed with this founder. Bluster is pretty much all they seem to do, frankly (I'd blocked them on linkedin not long ago because I got annoyed with it). But my friend's impression was "wow, they seem so confident and energetic!". The bluster (or what I think is bluster, anyway) nearly became a self-fulfilling prophecy, and still might if my friend accepts their offer despite my opinions.

This call, unfortunately, is coming from inside the house. We do signaling differently, but we still do it.

This is excellent. People do not take the time to truly understand human behavior and what it takes to shift i, along with the way that collides with the incentives corporations have.

Something I’ve started saying is “systems, not solutions.” If you aim to change the game at this point in most areas, you have to build a different system, not just a different solution. The way I define a system is also very important:

A system is a set of rules, norms, incentives, and consequences that define what is easy and what is hard.

You wanna change people’s behavior? Make the thing you want them to do stupidly easy. So easy they would feel like a fool to not do it. Then, make the thing you don’t want them to do incredibly hard, so hard that almost nobody will even try because it’s so clear to them that they’ll fail and feel terrible doing it.

That’s how you shift behavior.

Incentives are part of the story, but not all of it. Users can, and do, behave in ways that are deeply suboptimal in terms of getting the results they want. (In fact, the biggest success we had late in Triplebyte's history largely consisted of removing user agency in a way that didn't feel bad to them, precisely because users were behaving in ways that were counterproductive.)

Sophisticated users on mature platforms generally behave more-or-less rationally, but those will not be most of your users early on. That's to your benefit, because abuses take time to arise - you can get away with stuff on year one or two of your platform that would be a glaring vulnerability in year ten.

Obviously if your business strategy is "build X but better" where X is some incumbent on the market you already failed. Because they have everything that you as a start-upper don't have.. money, resources, visibility, name recognition etc. They can simply out compete you anywhere. And if the only value added and USP is "better" (even if that is objectively so by some metric) you really need to be 100x better in order to overcome the inertia that people have when switching over to your product. (Or you need to throw money at the problem...)

As a startup you really need a completely different USP and value proposition, look for something that that existing platforms/products don't do so well (or don't do at all) and see if there's a market in that particular niche.

Two sided markets (like LinkedIn) where you need both sellers and buyers (in this case employers and employees) are really hard because you have a chicken-egg problem and you can't get one side of the equation without the other side. So you really need to crack this by solving some other problem first that you can get either group on your platform before you can start dreaming of creating that kind of platform for sellers and buyers to meet.

wow I loved Triplebyte. The startup scene in Seattle was so small compared to the Bay area, so finding interesting companies was tough. I also loved skipping some of these places' horrible phone screens. The triplebyte backpack is STILL my daily driver. I was very sad to see it had been acquired and shuttered by honestly a company selling a horrible way to interview.

They didn't shutter us (we were dead anyway). And yeah, you're not the only one! I wouldn't have started a recruiting company in the year 2024 if I didn't think I was getting at a burning need, but the fact that no one shuts up about that product five years after it stopped existing was good reason to think there was one.

Every business competing against a juggernaut should start with a business model canvas, value prop canvas, and analysis of the value chain at the bare minimum (not to mention lots of research).

You need to understand what disrupting the value chain and industry norms means and clearly identify how you'll do it. Done right, the incumbent can't respond head on.

The classic example was the budget airline model. Instead of using huge hub and spoke airports they used cheap regional ones. They ruthlessly cut costs through standardisation and pared back their offering to such a degree only other budget airlines could compete. By the time the big boys saw the size of the threat, the newcomers were dominating their niche.

Linkedin won't live forever, but it'll be something that fundamentally makes it's model irrelevant that will replace it (think an actually correct AI vs Google for search). "Better" is just wasting everyone's time.

> The most important thing going on for them is they have network effect.

Yes, and the network effect is both what they have going for them and what causes the weird dynamics that make it so awful. I honestly don't think you can have one without the other.

If there are enough people on a platform for the network effects to kick in, then you'll never "stand out" the way OP's tool advertises, and it will inevitably slide into the weird. And if there aren't enough people for the network effects to kick in, then you'll never get to 3x as many interviews from having a profile on this platform (the number advertised).

I wish OP the best of luck, but I honestly don't think you can make a better LinkedIn because the problem isn't LinkedIn, the problem is corporate culture and what happens when you get enough people who are trying to sell themselves for a job into one space.

We had one without the other. The “LinkedIn influencer” only came to existence in the past 5-6 years. Before that, 99% of people never browsed LinkedIn, you only ever used it to lookup other people and job search.

What made it turn into this cesspool, is the endless engagement optimization and pursuit of profit above all else.

I have to disagree, as HN's resident anti-Display-Ads evangelist: the problem is the display ads! Display ads mean influencers, and LinkedIn messed up specifically by paying influencers extra if they got people to click "See More", which is why people on LinkedIn:

Talk like this.

To increase engagement.

And take up space.

They've been trying to change their value-prop from "we manipulate people into buying stuff" to "we offer useful services for professionals" by selling Premium subscriptions, which seems to be going well but still far from done: Premium sales account for ~12% of their revenue, leaving a staggering $14B to "LinkedIn Marketing Solutions".

https://techcrunch.com/2025/01/29/linkedin-passes-2b-in-prem...

https://news.linkedin.com/2024/July/LinkedIn_Business_Highli...

Advertising eats everything: It's the currency of the business world.

There’s an annoying reason advertising works - users don’t feel cost pressure as the company is forced to grow forever. Plus, people buy things, and ads work.

LinkedIn Premium struggles because it’s expensive as shit, and people will not pay that much for a social network most of the time, unless they have a dedicated reason to (job seeking, recruiting, etc.). We can say this is wrong and bad and it makes us the product, which is mostly true, but also it means we pay less for things with more utility.

Look at Netflix. Their ads tier is doing gangbusters. They keep increasing the amount of shows that are on that tier because it makes them more money, without users getting mad at price increases.

Now’s the hardest trick in the book is to provide high quality, contextual advertising in a way that doesn’t overwhelm your users but also creates value for your advertisers. Truthfully, nobody is better at this than Instagram.

If we actually want to solve this problem, the minimum wage needs to be radically reset, wages need to grow as fast or faster than inflation, and companies need to be incentivized by the market not to grow without bounds, but to reduce profit margins and find a healthy state where they throw off a solid amount of cash.

> LinkedIn messed up specifically by paying influencers extra if they got people to click "See More", which is why people on LinkedIn:

> Talk like this.

> To increase engagement.

> And take up space.

Ohhh that's why all the posts look like that? Barf. Goodhart's law strikes again...

I use LI a lot and noticed this trend and that any post that looked like that was garbage designed to create a lot of noise. They're easy to avoid now. It also helps as it is obvious when someone is a content troll as they're usually someone completely outside your network and talking about super generic things.

What killed it was being able to link and share to content that isn't your own,as soon as you could do that, people repost dumb shit. I don't know how you would enforce rules around without killing linking and sharing entirely though. Proving you own a domain or github repo works for developers but that's not something the broader population knows or cares to do.

> The “LinkedIn influencer” only came to existence in the past 5-6 years

The "influencer" in its modern incarnation is only 5-6 years old in general [0]. The culture has shifted dramatically and just creating a new platform isn't going to allow you to avoid the cultural shift.

[0] https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=%...

I've been thinking about what would be necessary to kickstart a Linkedin replacement on Bluesky (on top of AT Protocol). It's network and job postings. I won't say "it is easy!" It is certainly not. But, it is another walled garden than must come down.

Well I don't know...

Because the garbage posting is actually encouraged by LinkedIn.

Not just "the algorithm", but LinkedIn's peoples themselves.

At work we had a 2h workshop with one of their "something something engagement".

They basically told us:

- post content at least every other day, use AI to help you produce it

- like every post of your coworkers to give them visibility

- post comments on customers/partners posts to maintain engagement, use AI to help you produce them

Everyone should constantly put garbage there so others can promote it so... nobody reads it because it's garbage.

>post content at least every other day, use AI to help you produce it

"Everyone's a content producer, but no one actually reads anymore" is the worst trend happening.

The most annoying people on every platform are the "content producers".

Does go a long way to explaining why everything posted to LinkedIn is barely coherent corpo-speak that means nothing though.

Calling all humans for duty… Do your part keeping the dead internet alive!

The last company I worked for did this to boost corporate visibility. It was part of their marketing campaign to position themselves as SMEs in the industry.

How did that work out for you guys? Did any engagements / sales materialize from your efforts on LI?

No. Last I heard sales were still about where they were a few years ago.

To achieve what exactly? More visibility on LinkedIn? Does the algo boost you for it?

I think the problem is LinkedIn.

The itch it scratches could be handled without a feed at all. Give people a place to post their resume, their publications, links to their projects and achievements. Let them traverse their social graph to view each other's pages.

There was never any need to give them tools for spamming each other with updates to this info. If somebody is interested to know where you're working now, they can come to your page and view that info.

Wasn’t the news feed what made Facebook big? That digital slot machine with uncertain payoff every time you pull the lever (refresh the page) is what gets you to associate the social media app (eg LinkedIn) with dopamine hits. So you spend more time there = “engagement” = more ad spend etc

> Everyone (and their grandma, as they say) is on LinkedIn

Well, no, not everyone. I know a number of devs who aren't. I'm not either... I found the cost/benefit ratio of LinkedIn had become very unfavorable (not because of the non-professional content) and so I left it years ago.

Nobody was on Facebook. Everyone already has a MySpace profile so what’s the point.

Nobody was on Instagram. They got all their traffic from people posting photos on Twitter.

Nobody was on TikTok. They got all their traffic from people reposting TikToks on Instagram stories.

I’m not saying this project will succeed but it’s absolutely possible to build a new business social network.

Facebook had the cachet of being for college grads from Harvard and MIT. TikTok had the pandemic to help it along. (Not sure about Instagram.) There was also the mass migration from Digg to Reddit because of an unpopular redesign of the former. Is it possible? Absolutely, yes. But there needs to be a catalyst to make it happen that I don't think that can be caused with money.

That's true, but Facebook also had innovations: it was one the first popular websites to ask what people's actual first and last name was, then use that as their handle. It used AJAX relatively early. It had a better design than MySpace.

Likewise, I suspect Reddit got more growth through innovation - allowing people to create arbitrary subreddits - than through the Digg v4 mess.

Having a design that encourages trust (with a clean UI video content) is a good innovation over LinkedIn.

Is it enough? Probably not.

Is LinkedIn weak in other areas? Yes, fraud is huge. People lie about job titles and work dates and even entire roles. Tying in with Rippling etc, could defeat that. There's catalysts like you mention too: Reid Hoffman has also been accused of funding political violence via the recent ActBlue scandal in which 7 board members resigned.

Also inclined to agree with the innovation angle on TikTok. Was already growing and I think rather than Instagram, their in-flow was from Snapchat where Gen z/alpha were already trained on exploring filters and tools and TikTok expanded on that with extensive video editing tools and being feed first, creation later (default open mode on Snapchat remains the camera view).

Instagram caught the smartphone wave.

Also you don't have to eat the big fish: a better, smaller network aimed at a specific niche adding functionalities needed for said niche should be able to generate some profit. You may not get your 3 commas exit but setting up a business generating money is already a better result than most.

I think this is an important take. You don't have to be Tinder replacing match.com. You can be JDate.

Each one was supplanted by the next gen for "coolness".

The next thing after TikTok is going to be whatever gen A/B/C decide are the "cool" platforms. It could be a new 4th or they might recycle an old platform, the way that Adidas and Reekbok and Fila came back for sneakers for a bit.

For corporate social networking, the inertia of "cool" doesn't necessarily have an uncool factor that needs to be overcome in a similar way.

Will be interesting to see how the space plays out though.

Written in the style of a LinkedIn post even ;-)

I'm not on LinkedIn

I hate that this reads a bit like some of the LinkedIn posts in my feed.

and read.cv closed as well.

> LinkedIn feels more like Facebook every day

You can also restrict yourself to following friends, and disable notifications from people who write too much crap. I do this and my feed is acceptable.

That’s fair, and it definitely helps clean up the feed experience.

But the core issue we’re trying to solve isn’t just the feed — it’s how hard it is to stand out when applying for jobs. Resumes and LinkedIn profiles all start to look the same, and you’re often just another name in a pile.

From what we’ve seen so far, people who include short videos or unique showcases of their work get 3–5x more interviews.

If you make everybody stand out, than you're back again at step 1 where it's hard for someone to stand out.

The fact is we're just another name on the pile - but it's not because of presentation, it's because the underlying structure that determines how to the job market works and for what intent. There are exceptions of course, both for fair and unfair reasons, but there's nothing your platform is solving for me: I need a job, not to stand out by changing how I present myself. I see zero reasons to engage in it.

I still would want to mute terms. I am not going to delete current or past coworkers just because they became a LinkedIn 'entrepreneur' or into bad AI takes. Baffling that this isn't a thing on a site with such blatant post slop

You will sell out when the VC money starts flowing in.

I don't quite understand people's problem with LinkedIn - for me it has only one real page, my profile, and two other areas: recruiter chat and people I might know personally to link to. I got a job via recruiter chat on it once, and I drop in every few months or years to add a dot point to the resume. There's nothing else on that site?

Exactly. I have my updated profile on Linkedion. I occasionally ask for recommendations and I respond to messages from recruiters and use it as a professional address book.

I also use it to research the background of interviewers, potential managers, and coworkers. I work remotely so it’s the easiest way to do so.

Besides that I completely ignore it.

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