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Linkedin is really terrible. You are constantly spamed by career 'advices', recruiters, life coaches and people bragging about their work-related achievements.

Linkedin is really terrible. You are constantly spamed by career 'advices', recruiters, life coaches and people bragging about their work-related achievements... Its really difficult to find any interesting content there. I tend to spend no more than 10 seconds on it, unless I need to respond to a (recruiter) message. Feels like the only people getting anything out of Linkedin are those who are new to their respective fields, and need to network a bit and maybe land a new job. Otherwise, it feels like waste of Internet bandwidth. Frankly I have such a low opinion about Linkedin, that I'm amazed that nobody came up with an alternative yet. Maybe its the whole 'professional social network' concept that feels weird to me? While I socialize with my colleagues on regular basis, I dont want _work_ to be at the center of my socialization. I prefer to talk to people about other things in their lives.

sparkzilla 9y ago
I have been posting business-related content (curated news about famous entrepreneurs) to LinkedIn for over a year now. At first, I thought it would be a good opportunity because no-one else was curating news in that way. But once the pages got to about 3000 users LinkedIn deleted them all without proper explanation. They deleted my Donald Trump page first (leading me to think they were anti-Trump), and then when I complained they deleted the other six pages I was curating [1]. After a month of discussions, I was able to get the pages back, but the signups had dropped by half. But I persisted, only to have the UI change and for signups to be down 70% from before. Instead of 10,000 followers for Elon Musk news, I should probably have 30,000 if they hadn't meddled with it. Meanwhile, crappy clickbait is shared all around the site. I don't know why I bother to be honest. The site is useless for content creators. [1]https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/linkedin-deleted-my-donald-trump-news-page-when-i-all-mark-devlin https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/linkedin-deleted-my-donald-tr...
ag_47 9y ago
I've been greeted by obvious bugs in their UI too many times to count. Its the only "major" website I've ever come across with amateur mistakes. I can't recall any specifically, but +1 on not spending more than 10 seconds on it. And to be fair, the new UI seems to be cleaner so far.
stevekemp 9y ago
> I'm amazed that nobody came up with an alternative yet. Writing a replacement is something I've pondered for several years, but the problem is you need the network effect. It's like starting a dating site (something I did once!) - if people visit and nobody else is there it becomes an empty graveyard of dead dreams. Sure you don't need to scale to 6 million users immediately, but you need a good way to seed with users, and you need to make it captivating and interesting for those early users. The other thing you have to consider is that LinkedIn is the master of dark-patterns. To contrast that you'd want to make almost as much as possible open. So export the resumes in JSONResume, or similar open fashion. Of course when you do that you remove a reason for your visitors to stay. It's not an impossible task, but scaling and growing are hard.. I'm sure if you launched something it'd be popular, but would it be popular _enough_ to be worthwhile, and keep growing? Maybe if you launched on a per-country basis, or some other artificial constraint. (An alternative would be to allow signups to students and record course-histories, etc not just positions. That lets youngsters show their skills despite a lack of job-history.)
- drewrv 9y ago
  I've thought about writing a new Linkedin for years too. It's the curse of the engineer: you use something that sucks and you want to make a better one. But when thinking about a new Linkedin, I feel like making a new social network with less spam, less clickbait, and a better UI isn't enough to make people switch. What you really need to do is make a strong community centered around a particular industry with serious news, occasional gossip, and heavily moderated comments. In other words for our industry it exists: it's Hacker News.
patmcguire 9y ago
AngelList is a competitor, at least within our little sphere of the economy.

sparkzilla 9y ago

I have been posting business-related content (curated news about famous entrepreneurs) to LinkedIn for over a year now. At first, I thought it would be a good opportunity because no-one else was curating news in that way. But once the pages got to about 3000 users LinkedIn deleted them all without proper explanation. They deleted my Donald Trump page first (leading me to think they were anti-Trump), and then when I complained they deleted the other six pages I was curating [1]. After a month of discussions, I was able to get the pages back, but the signups had dropped by half. But I persisted, only to have the UI change and for signups to be down 70% from before. Instead of 10,000 followers for Elon Musk news, I should probably have 30,000 if they hadn't meddled with it. Meanwhile, crappy clickbait is shared all around the site. I don't know why I bother to be honest. The site is useless for content creators. [1]https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/linkedin-deleted-my-donald-trump-news-page-when-i-all-mark-devlin https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/linkedin-deleted-my-donald-tr...

ag_47 9y ago

I've been greeted by obvious bugs in their UI too many times to count. Its the only "major" website I've ever come across with amateur mistakes. I can't recall any specifically, but +1 on not spending more than 10 seconds on it. And to be fair, the new UI seems to be cleaner so far.

stevekemp 9y ago

> I'm amazed that nobody came up with an alternative yet. Writing a replacement is something I've pondered for several years, but the problem is you need the network effect. It's like starting a dating site (something I did once!) - if people visit and nobody else is there it becomes an empty graveyard of dead dreams. Sure you don't need to scale to 6 million users immediately, but you need a good way to seed with users, and you need to make it captivating and interesting for those early users. The other thing you have to consider is that LinkedIn is the master of dark-patterns. To contrast that you'd want to make almost as much as possible open. So export the resumes in JSONResume, or similar open fashion. Of course when you do that you remove a reason for your visitors to stay. It's not an impossible task, but scaling and growing are hard.. I'm sure if you launched something it'd be popular, but would it be popular _enough_ to be worthwhile, and keep growing? Maybe if you launched on a per-country basis, or some other artificial constraint. (An alternative would be to allow signups to students and record course-histories, etc not just positions. That lets youngsters show their skills despite a lack of job-history.)

drewrv 9y ago
I've thought about writing a new Linkedin for years too. It's the curse of the engineer: you use something that sucks and you want to make a better one. But when thinking about a new Linkedin, I feel like making a new social network with less spam, less clickbait, and a better UI isn't enough to make people switch. What you really need to do is make a strong community centered around a particular industry with serious news, occasional gossip, and heavily moderated comments. In other words for our industry it exists: it's Hacker News.

patmcguire 9y ago

AngelList is a competitor, at least within our little sphere of the economy.