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A little off topic... but I love this because it gives me an idea. I've been looking at LinkedIn with some immensely negative feelings for some time now. I've

by hadsed 7y ago

A little off topic... but I love this because it gives me an idea. I've been looking at LinkedIn with some immensely negative feelings for some time now. I've always wished someone would just disrupt the hell out of them, because they don't deserve the near-monopolistic position they're in. They just don't care about their users! And before someone says, "well [pushes up glasses] their real users are recruiters that they sell $20k/year seats to their search tool". Yeah, as a hiring manager I've tried using it. Awful! :) And jobs boards are nothing new, I guess, but something feels really nice about how much bigger these "Who is Hiring?" threads are getting on HN. Maybe we really do need a jobs-centric "social network" for industry verticals. Beyond terrible UX and general disrespect, LinkedIn also just doesn't do enough with their data to make it useable. Maybe that's because it's just too hard to do for every job and industry out there. And maybe that next-gen professionals' social network can be the first open and free one? Or maybe I'm just wishing too hard for something that can't/won't be done.

minimaxir 7y ago
> Beyond terrible UX and general disrespect, LinkedIn also just doesn't do enough with their data to make it useable. From LinkedIn's perspective, that's a feature, not a bug.
gota 7y ago
LinkedIn has become plagued by self-help-like stories and other self promoting, vague and meaningless write ups, in my experience. It wasn't always like this. I used to have a reasonably cool feed centered towards technologies and news that are at least partly relevant to me and my industry. No more. It's all 'I gave a homeless person lunch and today they are the #1 duck breeder in Brazil' or some other nonsense. I don't know when this started or if it is localized, but it renders the 'place to find useful information' aspect of social media completely void. There's no amount of reasonable curating effort that will save a news feed like that. I try not to be too negative about things but without some serious change I'll use a static LinkedIn profile and visit it for a fraction of a second every week - to check for messages - and nothing more.
- sharadov 7y ago
  I just can't stand the humble brag posts!
  - fnord123 7y ago
    I know! As someone with 500+ contacts to high powered professionals I'm inundated with a huge amount of humble brag posts!
    - seoulbran 7y ago
      *chuckle
  - lacampbell 7y ago
    You must hate Hacker News then. Well actually the bragging here often doesn't even get a veneer of humbleness.
    - elcomet 7y ago
      I disagree. I don't see much bragging around here. And amazing people hang here, which are often very humble.
      - sharadov 7y ago
        And if they brag, there is something to brag about.
- humblepie 7y ago
  Those are called "broetry" posts. I believe LinkedIn implemented some changes to reduce exposure on these, but I still see them regularly.
  - icxa 7y ago
    WHAT WOULD YOU DO WITH 12 DOLLARS IN YOUR POCKET AND A WIFE AND KID BACK HOME......
formercoder 7y ago
The only thing I really use LinkedIn for at this point is searching for 2nd degree connects / alumni at companies I'd like to work at, and looking up the professional backgrounds of people that I will be meeting with. However, being able to do this is super critical to networking and I almost always end up paying for premium whenever I'm job searching.
avip 7y ago
The median HN reader is missing the point of LI because it's not for developers. So you think "man, this sucks". You're like a carpenter looking at a welding machine saying "who needs this huge thing?". We developers have so many social networks to be found at - SO, github, angel.co, random reddit or discord groups. But others don't, and linkedin provides amazing value for them as a place to advertise their skillset.
- hadsed 7y ago
  I used SO for candidate search. It worked well for SF, but I recently moved to LA to start a team down here and it was just ridiculously... bad. LinkedIn was better, and that's saying something. But I think it's the scale effects of the social network at play here. SO just doesn't have the scale LinkedIn does. Neither does angel.co, though I can't say I've tried to do recruiting on github or reddit (is that something people do?). What I am saying is that after having used this thing for so long, I want to improve upon it. If it were open, like HN's Who's Hiring threads, I could just run a BigQuery job on it and do a sophisticated search for the candidates I want. I can maybe even do that and open it up for anyone to use, or sell it, whatever! It would provide value for people. But the thing that sucks about LinkedIn, aside from the spam by their growth-at-all-costs team, aside from the 5 second page load time, forget the terrible caliber of thought leadership... the BIG THING that makes it really hard to use is their data, or what they expose of it. And I'm wondering if it's just because figuring out the true years of experience (or something else) of someone is too hard for all jobs, but I know some tricks I can use to gauge that for an engineer. Because if I know everyone I'd want to hire is on the network, I would pay a lot of money to get full access on querying that data. But what LinkedIn has built for it is just sad. And the biggest barrier to building an amazing recruiter search tool is the fact that the entire network belongs to this giant corporation that isn't even doing a good job generating value from it! So let's open it up!
  - avip 7y ago
    Linkedin has years of experience filtering.
    - 7y ago
lapnitnelav 7y ago
I have a theory that LinkedIn the product is only a platform for LinkedIn the company to tell us how great it is to work for them. Add to that the "thought leaders", the quotes and other FB-ish artefacts, without forgetting a constant stream of brown-nosing and if you have 20% of the content that is interesting, you can consider yourself lucky. In contrast, I hang in an industry specific slack with folks all over the world and it's so much better. I don't have a solution to offer with regards to an open platform, but I think curated communities are the way to go.
philipkiely 7y ago
I think GitHub has a shot at becoming this if they added the right social features, I’m not sure if they should though.
- derekja 7y ago
  Since both linkedin and github are owned by microsoft it seems kind of pointless for them to compete.
  - dredmorbius 7y ago
    Well, there's that org chart... https://www.extremetech.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/microsoft-org-chart.jpg https://www.extremetech.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/micro...
DoreenMichele 7y ago
And maybe that next-gen professionals' social network can be the first open and free one? Volunteers have to have somewhat cushy lives to be able to give their time and expertise for free. Stallman was willing to live by his ideals. He was also intermittently homeless while doing so. These ideas of "We can rebuild it. We can make it better. We can also do it for free!" tend to be unrealistic fantasies.
- bena 7y ago
  Stallman also had the advantage of living within the university system for a long time while he built his reputation, so once he was on his own, he could use his reputation to solicit services. The average person has to do more to keep a roof over their head.
  - DoreenMichele 7y ago
    Yeah, he was often sleeping in some hacker space when he had no place of his own. It was like "homeless light," from what I gather.
morty_s 7y ago
Right? I think it could be done. I’ve been talking to friends about this for a couple weeks now. I’m actually kind of interested in the people that have done “3000 applications etc etc.” The 100-300 applications are fairy common, but 3k? Also, LinkedIn? more like LockedIn. There was a time where I enjoyed the service; I liked connecting with people doing interesting things from cool backgrounds. But, I wonder if it hurts more than it helps... I feel like a lot of jobs are filled before they’re flown, every other job is meant for people who already have a job. I like reading the job postings though; a lot of them are like non sequitur slam poetry. This might be my naïveté (or the ipa), but I feel like it’d be cool to have a reversed scenario where I can get info on the team, the project, etc. before even reaching out (i.e. companies apply to individuals, but I think I may have reinvented recruiting? I know this may be unrealistic...) Idk sometimes it feels like LinkedIn offers a non-service, talent will always be employed and/or sought; if everyone else is just a company’s 1000th pick aren’t they just wasting their time?

by hadsed 7y ago

minimaxir 7y ago

> Beyond terrible UX and general disrespect, LinkedIn also just doesn't do enough with their data to make it useable. From LinkedIn's perspective, that's a feature, not a bug.

gota 7y ago

LinkedIn has become plagued by self-help-like stories and other self promoting, vague and meaningless write ups, in my experience. It wasn't always like this. I used to have a reasonably cool feed centered towards technologies and news that are at least partly relevant to me and my industry. No more. It's all 'I gave a homeless person lunch and today they are the #1 duck breeder in Brazil' or some other nonsense. I don't know when this started or if it is localized, but it renders the 'place to find useful information' aspect of social media completely void. There's no amount of reasonable curating effort that will save a news feed like that. I try not to be too negative about things but without some serious change I'll use a static LinkedIn profile and visit it for a fraction of a second every week - to check for messages - and nothing more.

sharadov 7y ago
I just can't stand the humble brag posts!
- fnord123 7y ago
  I know! As someone with 500+ contacts to high powered professionals I'm inundated with a huge amount of humble brag posts!
  - seoulbran 7y ago
    *chuckle
- lacampbell 7y ago
  You must hate Hacker News then. Well actually the bragging here often doesn't even get a veneer of humbleness.
  - elcomet 7y ago
    I disagree. I don't see much bragging around here. And amazing people hang here, which are often very humble.
    - sharadov 7y ago
      And if they brag, there is something to brag about.
humblepie 7y ago
Those are called "broetry" posts. I believe LinkedIn implemented some changes to reduce exposure on these, but I still see them regularly.
- icxa 7y ago
  WHAT WOULD YOU DO WITH 12 DOLLARS IN YOUR POCKET AND A WIFE AND KID BACK HOME......

formercoder 7y ago

The only thing I really use LinkedIn for at this point is searching for 2nd degree connects / alumni at companies I'd like to work at, and looking up the professional backgrounds of people that I will be meeting with. However, being able to do this is super critical to networking and I almost always end up paying for premium whenever I'm job searching.

avip 7y ago

The median HN reader is missing the point of LI because it's not for developers. So you think "man, this sucks". You're like a carpenter looking at a welding machine saying "who needs this huge thing?". We developers have so many social networks to be found at - SO, github, angel.co, random reddit or discord groups. But others don't, and linkedin provides amazing value for them as a place to advertise their skillset.

hadsed 7y ago
I used SO for candidate search. It worked well for SF, but I recently moved to LA to start a team down here and it was just ridiculously... bad. LinkedIn was better, and that's saying something. But I think it's the scale effects of the social network at play here. SO just doesn't have the scale LinkedIn does. Neither does angel.co, though I can't say I've tried to do recruiting on github or reddit (is that something people do?). What I am saying is that after having used this thing for so long, I want to improve upon it. If it were open, like HN's Who's Hiring threads, I could just run a BigQuery job on it and do a sophisticated search for the candidates I want. I can maybe even do that and open it up for anyone to use, or sell it, whatever! It would provide value for people. But the thing that sucks about LinkedIn, aside from the spam by their growth-at-all-costs team, aside from the 5 second page load time, forget the terrible caliber of thought leadership... the BIG THING that makes it really hard to use is their data, or what they expose of it. And I'm wondering if it's just because figuring out the true years of experience (or something else) of someone is too hard for all jobs, but I know some tricks I can use to gauge that for an engineer. Because if I know everyone I'd want to hire is on the network, I would pay a lot of money to get full access on querying that data. But what LinkedIn has built for it is just sad. And the biggest barrier to building an amazing recruiter search tool is the fact that the entire network belongs to this giant corporation that isn't even doing a good job generating value from it! So let's open it up!
- avip 7y ago
  Linkedin has years of experience filtering.
  - 7y ago

lapnitnelav 7y ago

I have a theory that LinkedIn the product is only a platform for LinkedIn the company to tell us how great it is to work for them. Add to that the "thought leaders", the quotes and other FB-ish artefacts, without forgetting a constant stream of brown-nosing and if you have 20% of the content that is interesting, you can consider yourself lucky. In contrast, I hang in an industry specific slack with folks all over the world and it's so much better. I don't have a solution to offer with regards to an open platform, but I think curated communities are the way to go.

philipkiely 7y ago

I think GitHub has a shot at becoming this if they added the right social features, I’m not sure if they should though.

derekja 7y ago
Since both linkedin and github are owned by microsoft it seems kind of pointless for them to compete.
- dredmorbius 7y ago
  Well, there's that org chart... https://www.extremetech.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/microsoft-org-chart.jpg https://www.extremetech.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/micro...

DoreenMichele 7y ago

And maybe that next-gen professionals' social network can be the first open and free one? Volunteers have to have somewhat cushy lives to be able to give their time and expertise for free. Stallman was willing to live by his ideals. He was also intermittently homeless while doing so. These ideas of "We can rebuild it. We can make it better. We can also do it for free!" tend to be unrealistic fantasies.

bena 7y ago
Stallman also had the advantage of living within the university system for a long time while he built his reputation, so once he was on his own, he could use his reputation to solicit services. The average person has to do more to keep a roof over their head.
- DoreenMichele 7y ago
  Yeah, he was often sleeping in some hacker space when he had no place of his own. It was like "homeless light," from what I gather.

morty_s 7y ago

Right? I think it could be done. I’ve been talking to friends about this for a couple weeks now. I’m actually kind of interested in the people that have done “3000 applications etc etc.” The 100-300 applications are fairy common, but 3k? Also, LinkedIn? more like LockedIn. There was a time where I enjoyed the service; I liked connecting with people doing interesting things from cool backgrounds. But, I wonder if it hurts more than it helps... I feel like a lot of jobs are filled before they’re flown, every other job is meant for people who already have a job. I like reading the job postings though; a lot of them are like non sequitur slam poetry. This might be my naïveté (or the ipa), but I feel like it’d be cool to have a reversed scenario where I can get info on the team, the project, etc. before even reaching out (i.e. companies apply to individuals, but I think I may have reinvented recruiting? I know this may be unrealistic...) Idk sometimes it feels like LinkedIn offers a non-service, talent will always be employed and/or sought; if everyone else is just a company’s 1000th pick aren’t they just wasting their time?