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Everyone hates LinkedIn, yet most people keep using it (myself included). Where's the kickass LinkedIn competitor so we can all move on to ?

• mhidalgo 11y ago
  Just curious what are the things you hate about linkedin specifically.
  • fecak 11y ago
    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?").
    • throwaway7767 11y ago
      They also maintain shadow profiles of people who don't use linkedin by scraping their users address books. It's a really scummy company.
    • nothrabannosir 11y ago
      A really good way to deal with this is just mark all those mails as SPAM. Let them eat the negative SPAM feedback until all their mails end up in the trash.
  • dmeb 11y ago
    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
    • teddyuk 11y ago
      My wife received an sms text from the ceo at my old company inviting her to link in - crazy as they had never even met and I am 100% sure he is just an idiot and accepted everything the app asked him
  • krstck 11y ago
    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.
    • stevesearer 11y ago
      Where is this setting located? I'm looking for it to see if I've done that and can't seem to find anything about access to Gmail contacts.
      • krstck 11y ago
        If you hover over "Connections", select "Add Connections", and then "Manage imported contacts" in the top right corner. I had to hunt around to find it.
    • notahacker 11y ago
      Sometimes they get access to your connections because they shared their inbox, intentionally or otherwise. I get suggested contacts to all sorts of people that once sent me an email.
  • arikrak 11y ago
    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.
  • joosters 11y ago
    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.
    • theseatoms 11y ago
      To be fair, resumes have the same problem. You can list whatever "skills" you want. And in both cases you can ask the candidate to speak to their "skillset".
    • jchung 11y ago
      Interesting. I find the skills sections to be really helpful. I understand that the signal is not official and not a certification of any type, but the endorsements give me a sense for the extent to which someone is known by their peers and colleagues for a certain expertise. That's useful when I need to get up to speed on someone very quickly (e.g., when they got CCed onto a call with me and I don't know who they are).
    • vidarh 11y ago
      I know someone with multiple endorsements for "General Awesomeness". To be fair, he actually deserves those. But yes, not exactly a "skill".
  • elorant 11y ago
    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.
  • tokenrove 11y ago
    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.
• dikaiosune 11y ago
  It seems to me that monetizing a LinkedIn competitor would mainly be accomplished by selling advertising of some kind: -engagement ads of some kind (exposure to your business in general, banners, etc.) -leads for job ads and contracts -general job ads searchable by candidates But for a potential direct replacement (and selling the related ads), I think it's hard to justify building out a social networking platform when there are so many robust options already available. Unless you're going to really bring something new to the table there, why rewrite FB/LI/etc? In terms of selling access to candidates and job ads, lots of companies are starting to get this right in their particular vertical without having to include a social component (in software, see Angel.co, SO Careers, Hired.com, etc.). Just my 0.02 dollars, certainly not an expert here.
• dempseye 11y ago
  Why do you need LinkedIn at all? I never saw the value in it.
  • ThomPete 11y ago
    LinkedIn is a giant digital rolodex and works exactly because it allow me to keep my business network separate from my personal network.
    • Balgair 11y ago
      I just have 2 FB accounts. One for friends, one for work and volunteer stuff.
      • ThomPete 11y ago
        yeah but I don't have business connections looking me up on facebook. People have very different usage of Facebok. They look me up on Linkedin and I can see who they are and what they have done and who they know and search for relevant stuff. I meet a lot of investors and in general people from all over the world and have been very happy with LinkedIn personally. It's the least intrusive social network I know off.
      • adrianmsmith 11y ago
        This is against Facebook's terms of service: "You will not create more than one personal account." https://www.facebook.com/legal/terms https://www.facebook.com/legal/terms
  • galfarragem 11y ago
    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.
  • tomtoise 11y ago
    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.
• 3pt14159 11y ago
  Hey phowat, oneplusone and I are currently working on just that! I'm not sure exactly when we are coming out of private beta but the idea is that the application will ultimately be a multi-lingual, open source, professional social network, largely targeting workers that use computers in some way (designers, developers, electronic engineers, project managers, investors, etc). Companies and recruiters will not be welcome (at least initially) and there will never be advertising or a pay-for-spam model or any other super skeezy business model like individual information or making custom tools for government censors. We're hoping to not even have Google Analytics or any other 3rd party tracking site once we get out of open beta. Also, no spamming our own users ala LinkedIn. This is the notify me on open beta link: http://www.bonjour.is/ http://www.bonjour.is/ (Note the POST to the server is HTTPS, we just haven't bothered setting up the certs for the Ember App hoster yet.) Feel free to sign up to get notified if you want. Or don't. We'll post it here once we open up the beta anyway :)
  • vidarh 11y ago
    > 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.