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Ask HN: What would a LinkedIn competitor look like now?

• weinzierl 10y ago
  Like Xing. Ok, Xing copied a lot from LinkedIn (including some dark patterns) but overall it's a much cleaner experience. One thing that Xing does differently is that you cannot prevent other people to see when you visit their profile, not even as a paying customer. On the other hand you can only partially see who visits you if use the free plan. This gives the whole thing a different dynamic. People often sign up for a payed plan because they are curious to know who visited them.
  • zkirill 10y ago
    Thank you! First time hearing about it. They have some odd reviews on App Annie. https://www.appannie.com/apps/ios/app/xing-your-business-network/reviews/?start_date=2016-05-13&end_date=2016-06-12 https://www.appannie.com/apps/ios/app/xing-your-business-net... EDIT: Wow, their first release on iOS was back in 2009!
  • jpindar 10y ago
    I often get people visiting my profile who I cannot identify, despite my having the paid plan.
• Someone1234 10y ago
  The business model is essentially to trick people into signing up then spamming everyone in their contact lists with little permission, then in turn encouraging them too to sign up, rinse, repeat. Now that everyone has signed up just spam them with job adverts, charge recruiters for the spam, and make tons of money from effectively legalised spamming. That's more or less LinkedIn's entire business model. The real trick is setting it up to avoid violating the "Can Spam Act," but still make it needlessly difficult to unsubscribe or close the account.
  • zkirill 10y ago
    Thank you! I agree that spam is a big issue for LinkedIn and also seemingly for its competitors like branded.me. Would spam reduction tactics, both from the company itself as well as from members/bots, be one of the key differentiators? I would like to believe that it would be possible to be successful in this market without spamming your users.
    • Someone1234 10y ago
      It would be a major perk. I closed my LinkedIn account because of the spam and dishonest tactics. I want to feel like the companies I work with want everyone to "win" not only them (i.e. their users derive value also). The bots are problematic, but unfortunately some of it is humans acting bot-like, meaning recruiters pasting in generic messages, so even captchas might be ineffective. But anything a LinkedIn competitor could do to drop the spam, contact harvesting, and bots would be a massive perk over LinkedIn actual.
• 27182818284 10y ago
  Something less creepy. The dark patterns employed by LinkedIn in order have left a bad impression with say half of the people I know. Even the gray patterns are awkward--for example when it suggests I know other people at my organization simply because we coincidentally have the same last name.
• askafriend 10y ago
  Thinking about this in terms of a "direct competitor" is the wrong way to frame a potential business and nearly impossible at this point, I think. LinkedIn is fantastic at being LinkedIn. The only way to bring them down would be to approach a part of the problem they solve in a completely different way and in a compelling enough way that would make a piece of LinkedIn irrelevant. You can only compete by making LinkedIn irrelevant, not by building a better LinkedIn.
  • kilimchoi 10y ago
    I totally agree with you on this point. I think to make Linkedin irrelevant, you gotta be solving the user acquisition problem from a different angle. I think stackoverflow is doing a good job of doing that with developers. Dribble is doing that with designers. And there are bunch of other niche-based communities that attract people and formed a business model around recruitment which is a major source of Linkedin's revenue.
    • askafriend 10y ago
      Exactly! If Github offered better community discussion features and a professional portfolio/resume product for developers, then Github could become more relevant than LinkedIn for the developer community. If Dribbble doubled down on those types of things too, then Dribbble could be more relevant than LinkedIn in the Design community. etc, etc. and it's possible that people have various skillsets for which they have various types of professional personas. There's a lot of angles here, and it's not like they're not being explored, but these things take a long time. It's easy to forget.
• marryjanejack 10y ago
  I think this one is really promising http://ecvpro.com/ http://ecvpro.com/
• cylinder 10y ago
  Verified resumes. As in, dates, title and job are confirmed true.
  • zkirill 10y ago
    I actually think that this would be really big, in addition to being able to verify whether a person who is claiming that they have met you in person have, in fact, met you before.
• laxc 10y ago
  LinkedIn was so great at engagement at one time, but it feels like it went a bit too far which has created [I think] a negative flywheel. I accepted invitations from those who seems like were playing the game of some trying to get as many connections as possible. My once valuable LinkedIn Rolodex has degraded because I don't recognize most of my connections. I was getting endorsements from people I haven't known since I was a kid. They clearly aren't qualified to endorse me. And as mentioned, spam begets spam when it comes to recruiting. Recruiters take a machine gun approach to reaching out to candidates. Candidates understandably start ignoring those inmails. The recruiters then increase the # of people they reach out to, which then alienates more candidates. We (Step.com) are trying to take an approach where we crowdsource a professional's market value from companies while the professional isn't looking at a job. It's completely anonymous. And as the professional is getting valuable market data from the marketplace personalized to them, they are in effect building a little black book of companies that are interested in them. So once a professional does start looking, they have a starting point. I don't know if our approach is the answer (i hope it is) but I do think the next model needs to deliver high value content and protect professionals from the low value content and contact.
• bradknowles 10y ago
  I don't want a competitor to LinkedIn. I want a next-generation replacement for LinkedIn. One that doesn't spam me. One that doesn't encourage others to spam me. Xing looks nice, but it is very focused on Germany and german-speaking countries in Europe. But they are kind enough to have a landing page in English -- well-written, English, too. I'd almost use them for that reason alone, even though I don't speak German and I'm not in Europe. I can't tell anything about step.com, which seems to be in beta and focused on NYC. Surely the YC/HN crowd can come up with something good, right?