
Ask HN: What would a LinkedIn competitor look like now? - zkirill
I saw this tweet by Sundeep Peechu (https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;speechu&#x2F;status&#x2F;742365425380384770) and was curious why he thinks that now is a great time to start a competitor as well as what the competitor would focus on.<p>Does anyone here have any thoughts on this that they would care to share?
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Someone1234
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
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
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.

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weinzierl
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
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-
net...](https://www.appannie.com/apps/ios/app/xing-your-business-
network/reviews/?start_date=2016-05-13&end_date=2016-06-12)

EDIT: Wow, their first release on iOS was back in 2009!

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laxc
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.

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askafriend
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
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
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.

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bradknowles
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?

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27182818284
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.

------
cylinder
Verified resumes. As in, dates, title and job are confirmed true.

~~~
zkirill
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.

