> professional social network, largely targeting workers that use computers in some way (designers, developers, electronic engineers, project managers, investors, etc).

... and...

> Companies and recruiters will not be welcome (at least initially

So it's not a LinkedIn competitor, then.

It might very well turn out you're onto something great and I'm not saying this as criticism, but from description you're trying to become something fundamentally different from what LinkedIn is. Don't try to sell yourself as a LinkedIn alternative.

LinkedIn is where I go when I want to find someone important in company X that I wouldn't normally have access to, typically in functions that are usually outside of my normal circle. E.g. I got two separate SVP's at DHL to personally interfere to get a package I was waiting for redirected when their local customer service was being useless once.

It's where I go when I want to find recruiters with contacts in the right companies, whether to hire or to be hired.

It's where I go when I want to research companies to see if they're a good fit to work at, or a good fit to partner with etc.

It's where I go when I want to contact someone I've worked with in the past but not closely enough to e.g. have them on facebook or have their current phone number or e-mail. This last one appears to be pretty much the only one that fits your model, except I often want people outside of the techies.

This is why I'm reasonably active (couple of times a month) on LinkedIn, and not at all (once a year at most) on Facebook. For me, you'd fall closer to the Facebook end of the spectrum based on your homepage. That's not necessarily bad (clearly my Facebook usage is crazily atypical), but it's a different niche.

Page is completely blank on Safari 9.0 on OS X 10.11.

Screenshot - http://i.imgur.com/FUOrylH.png

Getting a blank page.

If you can't see value in LinkedIn you're either not looking or not in business. A global database of resumes/CVs is obviously extremely valuable.

LinkedIn is a giant digital rolodex and works exactly because it allow me to keep my business network separate from my personal network.

I got two job offers through linkedin - anecdotal I know but it was pretty good. Job offers from companies, I mean, not just mindless recruitment agency spam.

LinkedIn is or has the potential to be the best place to post/search quality job ads (maybe not very specific IT jobs - stackoverflow is great for that).

I know a lot of people that don't look for jobs anywhere else already - spam ads are very rare.

I don't know a recruiter or hiring manager that doesn't use it. That's the sole reason I use it for when applying to new companies they can vet my experience and work history.

I hate their usage of dark patterns to trick users into giving them access to their email contacts. I consider myself a fairly savvy user of the internet, and apparently I fell for it. (When I checked a while back, LinkedIn had access to my Gmail contacts despite my never intentionally giving them such.)

And as others mentioned, they send out emails that purposely look like some LinkedIn user has sent something to you specifically.

I think they're utter scumbags.

I really dislike their aggressive attempts to get new members to send out join requests to every person they've ever corresponded with on gmail. I've gotten many invitations from people whom I'm pretty sure had no idea that LinkedIn was going to scrape their contacts and spam everyone. This happens a couple times a year ever since like 2010? I haven't seen any other tech company do something similar. There is a lot of value in their network, but this is pretty obnoxious and basically dominates my impression of the tradeoffs they're willing to make

The biggest complaint I hear about LinkedIn is the amount of email the company sends users (not mail generated by other users, but mail generated by LinkedIn itself). It also seems to rather consistently ask to access your email contacts ("who do you know on LinkedIn?").

A few things off the top of my head.

The first thing that really put me off was when LinkedIn asked me to give them access to my Gmail account.

I don’t like their endorsement system. It asks my network to endorse me in things I’ve never mentioned I know. So the guy on your network thinks that he ought to endorse you out of courtesy and you end up with a list of a couple dozen things you are totally unaware of. How does this helps with anything?

Then there is the fact that pretty much everyone in there lies about their experience or their job titles. And I mean everyone, or at least everyone I happen to know. I get it, most people want to be perceived as more important than they are. But to me this whole situation seems ridiculous. And that leads to another problem. You can’t find any really interesting and engaging discussion because everyone is careful not to overstep any boundaries that might make them look unprofessional. Bottom line there is no community in there which makes the whole site much less useful.

Many aspects of their site are ridiculous. They hype up 'profile views' to try to get your to pay them to see a little more info about who viewed your profile. They encourage ridiculous endorsements that are completely meaningless. Etc.

I don't know if this is still the case, but around the time they IPO'd, I deleted my account as it had been worse than useless, but people I know mentioned I continued to show up as if I was still on the site.

Tons of recruiter spam and so on, not to mention the email dark patterns.

All "x site is the new resume" approaches are flawed, but at least GitHub-as-resume encourages publishing code and evaluating people by the code they've written and how they interact with open source projects. LinkedIn is good for cronyism and pretending that "n years at Company Inc." is particularly meaningful.

The completely pointless 'skills' sections, where anyone can add whatever skills they like to their profile. Oh, you're skilled in 'Data Center'? How utterly meaningless.