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desipenguin

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.

View on HN

> 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...

> 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.

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.

> 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=%...

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.

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'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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.)

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.

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.

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.

I'm not on LinkedIn

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

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

> 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.

and read.cv closed as well.

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