Show HN: LinkedIn sucks, so I built a better one
Thats why I used to built a personal microsite on Squarespace and uploaded a video resume to YouTube to stand out - it helped me land interviews and get into Big Tech.
But I always wondered: why isn’t there a platform designed to help you stand out like that?
So I built OpenSpot: a public, curated platform where you can showcase who you are — with video, audio, and proof of your work. No endless feeds. No humblebrags. Just real people open to new opportunities.
We’ve already onboarded a few companies, so recruiters can reach out to you directly. But you can also connect with other standout folks and supercharge your network.
Just upload your resume and we´ll automatically generate your profile in under 1 minute.
It’s early, but feels like something people actually need. Would love your thoughts.
US HR used to throw away any photos that people attached to resumes. (Usually someone attaching a photo was a recent immigrant, who didn't know the US convention.)
I've even heard rumors that some companies/screeners had a policy of throwing away resumes that included photos or other gratuitous information that could be the basis for illegal/problematic discrimination.
"Because LinkedIn does it" isn't a good argument, because LinkedIn is pretty awful, and the only things going for it are: (1) the majority of people are on it, and (2) recruiters sometimes search/spam there.
Some social media sites do photos because they pander to the worst. Or, in the case of one prominent social media site, infamously because the original inspiration was to catalog the best-looking women at their college.
Unless you're a headshots site/app for hiring models/actors, best to go with content-of-their-character, and all that.
It is surprising how culturally specific this is though - I've had CVs for hiring in our offshore centre in India where a candidate listed his father's details as a contact.
Even more of a culture shock was how much more open people are about their biases in those cases. "We can't have someone short doing job X, or they don't have a friendly face for Y, etc."
Most people I spoke with said if you show up with Europass it's considered a negative flag, but I suppose it may still be useful for some "less modern" jobs.
[0] https://europass.europa.eu/
It's just a PDF in the end.
It encourages you to put a lot of things in it which are generally not interesting, much like in the old days you'd list the ability to drive a car in your CV, or having finished the mandatory military conscription.
People prefer a one pager with relevant experiences than a five pages which include your id number, birth date and address.
You can of course do a Europass CV with less info, it's just not how people do it generally, according to the people who complained about it (I'm just reporting what I heard, I don't care about the CV format)
For example, and I can only speak in anecdotes from my experience job searching in Greece, I had HR reps asking me my birth date, or when I'm gonna get married (I'm single).
So it's like, people who will discriminate on me exist, and I can only work on my real skills.
We're not trying to turn hiring into a popularity contest or a casting call. The point of video or a photo isn’t to favor looks — it’s to give people a chance to show personality, communication skills, or walk through a project — especially in roles where that matters (e.g. PMs, founders, designers, etc.).
That said, both video and photo are optional. We’ve seen that for many candidates, especially those early in their careers or from non-traditional backgrounds, a short video can dramatically increase response rates — not because of appearance, but because it humanizes them and cuts through the noise of generic applications.
We’re 100% aligned that character and substance matter most — we just want to give people more ways to show that, not perform for it.
And I don't know if building another platform with a feed will solve that problem. Because the existence of a social feed itself might be the issue here. But then what do you have if you don't have a feed? Is that a "platform" anymore if all that's on there are peoples' resumes?
I feel that building the next LinkedIn is really building the next LinkedIn community. That can't necessarily be done through computer code. I mean, look at the kind of community building that it took to build out HN.
This exists because there is limited courage to call this out. There are not many polite ways to tell someone this, you would need people in their life to pull them aside and point it out. It's very similar to being the friend that pulls someone outside and explains they need to brush their teeth (someone has to do this, with love). Maybe more working professionals need to blog about this so the broader community can be educated on behavior when it comes to excess vanity and general manners.
For example, it's simply rude to broadcast your new job when some people are struggling with it (will they ever get one? will they get fired? are they good enough?). Just the very fact that there are "some" should be enough to kickstart one's manners, even if that "some" is not a lot of people.
It's simply rude to continuously market things (anything) when there are people literally ... stressing themselves over the pressure of competition. Again, as an example, a person constantly marketing their looks is putting stress and pressure on many others - this is a simple fact. The same goes for those with wealth and opportunity.
To be fair, LinkedIn is nominally a professional networking site. Broadcasting your new job is absolutely in scope for that site.
It’s the “what the death of my dog taught me about viral content marketing” or “how my child losing her soccer game made me a better manager” posts that are out of control.
My personal favorites are people bragging about working during their wedding / funeral / vacation. “Joe is such a dedicated worker! Look he is taking time out from his bachelor party to deploy this database schema change!”
LinkedIn is a job site. It is completely appropriate to announce you got a job. I want to know that people in my network have a job whether I have one or not. It means that I can reach out to them and ask if the company is still hiring.
> It's simply rude to continuously market things (anything) when there are people literally ... stressing themselves over the pressure of competition
> a person constantly marketing their looks is putting stress and pressure on many others
The way you put it nothing should ever happen.
Everything has pros and cons. There's no perfect solution to make everyone happy.
For example if I vote for 1 party, the other party loses votes so puts stress and pressure on them i.e. I shouldn't vote? Then they both lose out.
Or we should have monopolies everywhere because introducing competition puts stress and pressure on the existing player?
There's a reason these things aren't standard in resumés (at least for jobs that don't have a focus on appearance).
We're in such a connected age that anyone wanting to know your face can 99% of the time just google your name. That was an issue talked about even 20 years ago in my grade school days of Myspace.
Unless you legitmately have no photo of yourself on the internet (including LinkdIn), adding a photo here will not give or take much away from a malicious actor.
>There's a reason these things aren't standard in resumés
because companies are so scared of litigation that they won't even give feedback anymore. It's not a particularly good reason if we're being honest.
I feel like video will help mitigate this, as personalty and soft skills are communicated better that way. But if a company is going to discriminate based on a video, then they are going to discriminate when they interview you in person, no?
No comments yet
2. There's a variety of roles out there, and for many "executive presence" is important qualification.
(But really though,its because of tiktok)
I also sort of feel like, people already hate cover letters. Now we’re trying to normalize audition videos? Maybe it’s me who’s out of touch?
Putting headshot in resumes is not expected and even cringe in my country, but some countries expect headshots and other highly personal info. No thanks.
That is hard to prescribe and those tech giants probably don't care much what it is as long as people are engaged.
https://bewerbung.com/lebenslauf-ohne-bewerbungsfoto/
> Eine Bewerbung ohne Foto zu verschicken, ist in den vergangenen Jahren zu einem regelrechten Trend geworden. Bei vielen Personalern genießen Lebensläufe ohne Bewerbungsfoto daher eine hohe Akzeptanz [...]
We shall not copy everything from America.
And the site goes on…
The company will anyway see you, if you’re lucky. Your name, birthdate, education and address (people often underestimate the address) tell a lot. I don’t care about colors of hair, eyes or skin and the scar across the check is at least something which allows me to recognize a person.Of course for every application a new one! </irony>
You should copy not needing photos on CVs. Doing so introduces an unacceptable risk of bias.
In former days (until perhaps the end of the 90s) sending in a photo as part of an application was expected. But by now the customs have changed.
Photos may not be the final solution to this flood of automation, but it's being dabbled with.
The majority of people do not have a picture of them on the Internet.
You can already generate a profile picture and have it lip synced with a text to speech audio (or even speech to speech). It's a losing (lost?) fight
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FK8sgB-58q0
Internet is rapidly becoming a pile of steaming shit already, captchas were annoying but now it seems the "are you a robot" test is coming everywhere, what a sad state of affairs. I wonder how much of the overall traffic is automated, 80%? 90% ?
Photos are not required on OpenSpot - We included them because some people want to humanize their profile — but we’re also very aware of the bias/discrimination concerns, especially in the U.S.
The intent isn’t to mimic LinkedIn or create a polished image-centric profile like a dating app — it’s to offer optional ways for people to show who they are, beyond just a list of bullet points. For some, that’s a photo. For others, it’s a project demo or a short intro about their work.
That said, we’re actively listening and learning. If we find that photos do more harm than good — especially around bias or UX — we’re open to evolving that part of the product.
Thanks again for the thoughtful take — this kind of feedback makes the product better.
Don't they recommend having LinkedIn profile picture for better chances of getting shortlisted? Also assuming you are talking about physical resumes. Wouldn't having a photo attached to resume make more sense in terms of identifying the candidate correctly at any given stage of recruitment, before or after the in person interview?
I'm from The Netherlands.
How am I supposed to distinguish the thousands, maybe millions of Johns and Janes without a picture to recognize them by?
OpenSpot isn’t meant to replace formal resumes entirely — it’s designed to help people stand out before that stage. It’s public, searchable, and curated — so if a recruiter finds someone interesting, they can reach out directly or request a formal resume.
Photos are optional, but yeah — they can help distinguish one Jane Doe from another, especially in a directory-style setting. Same goes for a short intro, project link, or anything else that brings some personality into the mix.
The LinkedIn feed problem can be solved by not going to the feed.
Pretty sure that I’m really the only person that cares about it. That’s fine with me. I write for myself. Much of what I’ve written has “aged out,” by now (for example, I have a series on the Swift Programming Language[1], that may reflect dated observations).
When I write stuff, it helps me to “firm up” my own knowledge and understanding.
I’m no longer seeking work, but have a LinkedIn profile, so anyone that wants to know me, can get an idea. I basically stay away from LI. Every now and then, I may make a post, when I do a release of something .
[0] https://littlegreenviper.com/miscellany/
[1] https://littlegreenviper.com/series/swiftwater/
I also will check out candidates’ blogs if they list them. Some people have “blogs” but the content is mostly throwaway or hello world, but anything more than that is impressive to me. (Same thing with GitHub, hopefully it contains more than just forks of various repos with minimal diffs.)
Even if you don't get any useful organic traffic, I find having a technical blog is useful so that when you do go to interviews or submit resumes, hirers can read your blog and quickly establish that you know what you are talking about.
No need to fix it if you don't want to but may be useful.
But if there's a place where the text doesn't separate (and flow below), that's a bug, so I'll review.
0. https://littlegreenviper.com/infrastructure/
I’ll check it out. That’s an old post, that was imported wholesale, from another site.
There was a link to a post, here, some time ago, that was about why we should write, and it was mostly for self-benefit. That's why I do it. I'm retired, and spend time learning and honing my skills. I write code for free, for folks that can't afford folks like me. I like to do a good job at it, and I like learning new stuff.
I've found that writing [tutorials, especially] is a great way for me to learn.
Except that it's 100% AI generated.
So it's only a matter a time before having a personal technical blog is seen as average as having a LinkedIn & GitHub account...
2) Wayback machine exists.
3) People who are bad at tech jobs will probably be bad at creating convincing fake tech blogs.
For a dev? Surely you are not being serious.
I find the idea interesting, but also puzzling -- If you work at a commercial company on proprietary software, like most of software engineers, there is very limited amount of things you can talk about work and not leak proprietary/internal information. Otherwise, you need to work enough outside work to have things you can talk about freely. I don't want to have a blog where it's all opinion and no concrete details, like my meaningless comments on HN. How do you manage to post "useful" things on a personal blog?
For instance between 2016-2021 where I was working in a large financial institution (Capital One), but still blogging about the work I was doing and problems I was solving, without leaking proprietary information
A lot of them didn't have the "context" for what problem was being solved or why, or I'd need to create a minimal example to help explain what needs to be fixed, which is also a very good skill to be more practiced in
You can also see how over the years of my career (https://hire.jvt.me/), some organisations have led to me blogging more openly about /what/ I'm doing
I also have a bunch of personal projects about which I can talk.
Topics like "what we learned load-balancing a tomcat cluster" contain genuinely useful information, but the company I worked for at the time didn't consider them proprietary because the proprietary stuff was what they ran on the cluster.
I'll acknowledge that this won't be the case for everybody. I've been pretty lucky that none of the companies I worked for prevented me from writing about these topics; some were happy to use what I wrote for their own promotional material.
(I don't want to dox myself, so I'd rather not share a link to my blog, and "what we learned load-balancing a tomcat cluster" isn't the literal title of a blog post I wrote.)
If you have the time, though, open-source is a good way to work on non-proprietary, useful things.
- a recruiter from Amazon Retail reached out to me about an SDE 3 (L6) position when I had nothing on my LinkedIn profile aside from a bunch of CRUD jobs on my profile. I
- After talking to the recruiter, they suggested I apply for a remote role at AWS Professional Services which I did get. Funny enough, I had two recruiters reach out to me from Amazon on LinkedIn while I was - working at Amazon and it was on my profile.
- I had a recruiter from Google reach out to me while I was at Amazon for an Engineering Manager position. The problem is, my current position wasn’t even a software developer on my profile and I had no management experience.
- a recruiter from Meta hounded me for months about a senior position as a developer specializing in AI. Did I mention that my most recent role at the time wasn’t as a software developer and I had no AI experience?
- Even before working at Amazon, recruiters from Netflix reached out to me. No I wouldn’t have had any chance passing the interview
Recruiters - even at BigTech reach out to anyone with a pulse. I still get recruiters from BigTech reaching out to me about software development positions even though for the past five years my profile clearly shows a pivot to cloud consulting and customer engagement.
The purpose of the tech blog isn’t to impress recruiters because as you say they are impressed if you mention drinking a cup of java once or have a pet python. The primary purpose is for your own understanding. The secondary purpose is to impress someone familiar with your field.
> Writing a blog relatively regularly got me job offers from FAANG companies.
That’s just not how things work at FAANG. There is a regimented process with multiple interviews and then after the interviews, all of the interviewers enter their notes and discuss. I can’t imagine anyone in the loop saying “I read their blog post and they should be hired”.
Hiring is completely about some combination of how the candidate did on coding, system design and behavioral interviews.
In 2010 (15 years ago), all of the current FAANG companies were already large except Meta and it was growing rapidly.
In 2005 (20 years ago), how many people were blogging? 20 years ago, the interview process was even more esoteric than it is today at least at Google. I haven’t heard stories about any of the others
Yes I was around back then.
Yes, I can see someone standing out in 2005 making helpful blogs qualifying under this. I can see it in 2015 as well if they are a subject matter expert or happen to otherwise be explaining the exact concepts a certain team needed.
I can't verify it firsthand, but clearly processes can be waived if desired. I did an entire interview gauntlet for my first "big" tech job in 2019. My lead hired the year prior describes his process as a director calling to him over lunch to talk about the company and basically got the offer on the spot, as if it was the 60's all over again. The director was in the same room as me nodding as my lead told the story.
Heck, even a mild anectode: a colleague of mine (maybe 2-3 years ahead of me in experience) was able to skip some coding test stage at Amazon to move through the process faster because he negotiated being close to another offer. Great worker but he didn't have any fancy accolades nor side projects/blogs. It was just a burning hot market and FAANG wanted whoever they could grab with good experience.
Hey, it's me, the person who said that!
>I read their blog post and they should be hired
Yes, that's what happened. Obviously, it's not "I read your blog, sign this contract, and you're hired." The actual sequence of events the one time I said yes was:
"Hey, I read your blog. I work for team X at company Y. Are you interested in working here?"
"Yes"
"OK, HR will contact you."
A 20-minute call with HR, followed by an invitation to onsite team interviews. One day of interviews. Job offer.
I have no idea what the internal process for that was, but I assume they have some referral program or something like that.
>In 2005 (20 years ago), how many people blogged?
I started blogging before the word "blogging" existed. I wrote my blogging software without knowing it was "blogging software."
Having a blog allows me to compile my notes into a digestible and easy to read way, so if I revisit a project later I at least don't have to start from scratch.
Openspot actually leans into that same idea: instead of feeding the algorithm, you just show your work — whether that’s a blog post, demo, video, or a quick walkthrough. It’s all hosted on your profile, so you can focus on signal over noise.
Stand out? "Write about stuff" is literally generic advice nowadays. Most of the content is crap, because people are only writing because other people suggest it.
And I really can't. Thanks, games industry. So I need to make it a full time job doing signifigant side projects just to show off my skills for jobs.
Even then, this market right now isn't in "we'll call you" mode unless you're highly specialized.
- Offers a dev "enough" control (some HTML/CSS/JS support but not total control)
- Stays largely out of the way (maybe something like a "powered by" header/footer only)
- Doesn't try to lock free posts behind paywalls
- Is independently owned and not a big tech product (so no Blogger)
- Is abstracted enough so that someone doesn't need to know domain, DNS, hosting, VPS, or sysadmin stuff in general to start a website
The closest things I've seen to this are Neocities and Glitch. The best one used to be Blogger, but again it's big tech so you can't use it without being assimilated into the Google collective consciousness.
https://bearblog.dev
You can see examples on the discover page.
https://bearblog.dev/discover
It has a small collection of simple pre-built themes, while also supporting custom CSS.
https://docs.bearblog.dev/styling
You can use GitHub pages with Hugo which is what I do. You can build out a series of GitHub gists that link to each other. You can host a static S3 website with raw HTML. You can post redundantly to Twitter/Bluesky/your own subreddit/Medium/Google drive.
It doesn’t matter if there’s no single solution to every possible problem. The point is to write something interesting so 1) you understand it better 2) you can reference it later if you forget some details 3) you can show off to potential employers.
Whether or not it’s owned by big tech is a non-goal as far as getting a job is concerned.
if you really can't be bothered to set any of that up, I suppose you can always find one of the non-mainstream open-source microblogging platforms. I'm sure there are some lovely "reddit alternatives" out there that feel great to blog on but has an audience of a dozen people internally.
[1]: https://write.as/
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micro.blog
5 years ago maybe.
Now every tech/recruiting "influencer" suggests the same tactic, and the vast majority of it is pure slop, checking a box.
I don't want to record videos of me presenting myself.
LinkedIn seems simple. I post a CV and I toggle if I am open to work or not. Recruiters can find me and I can search for jobs and apply to them. That is all the functionality I need apart from having lots of jobs available on the platform.
The reason OpenSpot might "suck less" for some is because it focuses only on one thing: helping people stand out. No feed, no fluff, no algorithm — just a clean, curated profile where you can show off your skills, projects, and intent in a way that cuts through the noise.
And to be clear: you don’t have to record a video. That’s optional. Some people link to projects, write a short blurb, or just highlight their strengths in a more human way than a traditional CV.
It’s not a LinkedIn replacement — it’s an alternative for those who feel like they’re getting buried in the system and want more visibility without the social media layer.
Appreciate the honest question!
At least in my personal experience, having a personal website where I write about interesting stuff I do has opened a lot more doors than linkedin ever did.
One benefit of an algorithmic feed is that it works as as social proof in showing me that other people are actually using the site. Since your site doesn't have a feed apparently by design, you'll need some way of showing me (quickly!) that this is a living, breathing website that people actually use, otherwise it feels like I'm shouting into the void.
Another benefit of a feed is that I can immediately see how my activities and updates will look to other people. But it's not clear during onboarding how things will look to others, let alone who can see my profile and activity. Can any other user view my profile, or is it just a select cohort of hiring managers? Can I even interact with other users on this site who aren't hiring managers?
Next, after I import my resume and setup my profile, I am asked (I think) to write some sort of an article or essay with AI assistance. This step wasn't very clear, but even if it were, this is a huge ask for someone who just started using your site. The first ask should be something much less ambitious, and probably would benefit from gamification to make it feel less like homework
Finally, I clicked on the explore button to try to find folks to connect with. I gave a detailed description of the personas I'm interested in to the bot, and ended up getting a "No matching Candidates found" message. I think you should at least show me something, especially when I can't seem to do a regular search / browse manually -- or suggest better queries
Anyway, I know it's an MVP, and I see answers to some of my questions on your about page, but just offering this as food for thought. The overall onboarding was smooth and I appreciate the resume import experience, and I think you have a strong visual identity. Curious to see where you end up taking this
Obviously, because if you make a whole platform like that, nobody stands out any more, but everyone if forced to do more (unpaid) work than they did before. For the recruiters/hiring managers it is impossible to process video and audio at scale either.
The goal with OpenSpot isn’t to force everyone to do more unpaid work or replace resumes entirely — it’s to give people who want to stand out an easy, high-signal way to do so, especially if they’re not getting traction through traditional means.
For recruiters, the platform is curated and searchable, so they’re not sifting through hundreds of TikTok-style intros — they’re seeing real signals of quality, with depth if they want it.
We're not trying to increase the noise — we're trying to cut through it.
Change it to “Most recent posts” and you’ll stop getting random influencers in your feed telling you that vibe coding is the future.
We’re not pushing video as a requirement — it’s just one option for people who want to show more personality or communicate things that don’t come across in text. Some folks prefer writing, some showcase projects or code — all of that works on OpenSpot.
The idea is to give people more ways to be seen for who they are, not force everyone into the same format.
I don't really think there's a way to fix that, because I don't think there are enough of us (or enough people looking to hire us) to build a substantial userbase.
I just want to highlight it as one of the reasons some people hate LinkedIn, which has nothing to do with spammy feeds or influencers.
I can make a case that I can do just about anything that sounds interesting to me. It just really does end up needing to be custom every time!
It does sort of make me wonder if I could compile an outrageously detailed list of everything I've done in past roles and feed it to an AI to sort out how to frame things based on job description.
You can’t compete against LinkedIn on network for now, and many years to come. So need to talk about the now value. But try to build in network effects (tag who you worked with) as soon as you manage to crack growth.
Or ignore me. My version didn’t work!
Totally agree: we're not trying to compete with LinkedIn's network (yet). Our focus right now is exactly what you said — making it beautiful and dead simple to create a portfolio that feels personal, professional, and worth sharing. Something that makes people say: “I want one of those.”
We’ve got network effects on the roadmap too — things like tagging collaborators, showcasing teams, and making intros more fluid — but only once we’ve nailed the individual value first.
Appreciate you taking the time
My goals overlap a lot.
If you haven't seen https://huntr.co I think they do a great job helping you manage job hunting.
I think the social feed is LinkedIn's weakness as well. It creates a bad incentive for the company. I would use it a lot more if the feed was useful instead of fake engagement bait. Same with LinkedIn Learning being more about basic entry level courses than quality expert content.
My suggestion is to help people build valuable networks that discuss actual hard topics. I've seen a few companies try to create small exclusive groups that cost money to join but they try to guarantee meaningful, intelligent discussions & sharing. LinkedIn once tried to limit your network, which I still think was the right way to run it.
A popular marketing technique is to be the "Anti" company. I hope you can pull off the Anti-LinkedIn. The copywriting for that should write itself.
One more aside on recruiting. LinkedIn's infamous for terrible recruiters trying to fill quotas it seems. I don't know if recruiters need limits on messaging people or some type of ranking system.
Funny enough, “The Anti-LinkedIn” has come up more than once during this launch - and I agree, the copy kind of writes itself when people feel the same pain.
Also +1 on Huntr — great tool! We’re focused more on visibility and standing out before the apply button, but I think they complement each other well.
You nailed something really important: the real opportunity is to create networks with actual signal — thoughtful discussions, deep expertise, and real connection. Not the dopamine feed. We’re starting super lightweight, but that’s absolutely part of the long-term vision.
And yeah… LinkedIn Learning + random recruiter spam + engagement farming = what pushed us to build this in the first place. Thanks again for taking the time — would love to stay in touch as we build.
Ha, hadn't heard of it. I'll have to take a peak for sure...
Am I going to be able to find new customers on this platform, consistently, like I do in LinkedIn? If not, why would I spend the X number of hours I have dedicated this month to finding new clients on this platform?
If you can Crack this nut you will have no problem finding users.
At least when I joined, LinkedIn was about connecting to your respected colleagues, so that in the future if you needed help from your network (a job, info about a product, but perhaps most importantly, a 2nd-level introduction), then you could ask for it.
I'm perhaps a dying breed but I still only connect to LinkedIn people that I either have worked with or know at more than a passing level. I make strong use of the "I don't know this person" when I receive unsolicited invites.
In my view you are missing out on a huge part of the value, and a lot of career opportunities by not using it to meet new people who share your field, vision and passion for your work. It's like listening to the same songs over and over and never doing any music discovery. It's not so "salesy", it's more about expanding your network beyond people you already know. This isn't something to eliminate, this is the whole value of the platform. Otherwise it's just a glorified mass text.
I can go to a dozen local meetups and not meet one heart transplant surgeon or CEO of an artificial heart company or other blood pumping medical device. Even major cities have only a handful and they are busy. There is very little chance of bumping into them at a local meetup. It's much more time efficient for us to connect in this way.
Anecdotally, I've seen its common in the bay area at least for folks to exchange linkedin qr codes right away when meeting new folks, like a business card.
However in both cases I expect an assistant etc to be at a conference, who then can introduce me. Which immediately is more personal than one in a million messages on LinkedIn.
But again, not my field.
Depends on the person. But I'm sure the most conscientious ones will be the people making those "viral" posts that makes them connections. a potentially pompous surgeon is more than no surgeon if your goal is meeting likeminded connections.
>in both cases I expect an assistant etc to be at a conference, who then can introduce me.
sure, a conference which may not be in your area (so add in time and money to travel), potentially in certain areas needing a higher level pass (so more money). It's effective, but not potentially accessible. As well as rare; unless you have plenty of travel time you may only get to go to a few conferences a year. And even with all that a deep connection is not guaranteed.
Do you say so from personal experience?
So in the end, you are saying this is a networking app for people who want to network using apps less?
But again I also think that LinkedIn is a childish name, and is not commercial and professional as well.
I wish you luck.
In fact, your platform is broken, since its focus on visual selling is the same bias as having photos on a resume. So you are not improving over LinkedIn.
Make a primarily text only platform, and visual showcase should only be of things you have done. All non-objective things should be removed. Then make hooks for applying to jobs so everything gets filled in one click.
I guess it helps the conventionally attractive people, because from their perspective they're suddenly doing better thanks to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halo_effect
Not entirely unlike someone having a "personal brand", a following on social media, some content that they create on YouTube or wherever, vs someone who just has a document with some impressive sounding projects within past orgs.
Op has made a nice looking site - but I absolutely hate the idea of having to film myself.
It's also worth remembering peoples biases (to be plain racism and sexism); many studies show that these level out when you remove the need for people to have names on their job applications.
By having videos you are going to turbo charge this.
Sorry op, but this this is a hard no. This kind of site should be text only.
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224
I wish them the best of luck!
"People are saying Google Glass was silly, sounds like a dropbox comment, surely it'll become the next big thing"
"People are saying the Humane AI Pin is useless, you can just use your phone, sounds like the dropbox comment lol"
"People criticized ScamCoin5000 saying 'just do a regular ponzi scheme with cash lol', people also said 'just use ftp' about dropbox, so surely ScamCoin5000 will be the biggest thing since sliced bread"
It's a frustrating thought-terminating cliché, and I'm really tired of hearing it at this point. "The internet started small, so that means the crypto/our ICO/NFTs/metaverse/AI is also just at the beginning but will become huge", uh huh, sure.
Supposing this project gets off the ground, maybe even somehow surpasses linkedin, some investor will come along, flash a big pile of cash at the owner and bam, through various monetization strategies to make back that money, you end up back at linkedin.
Linkedin isn't the way it is because they didn't know how to make good UI.
No text, I see. It's so last century.
> No endless feeds. No humblebrags. Just real people open to new opportunities.
Question is: when the people from Linkedin come to your site, won't they post the same crap as they do on Linkedin?
I'd guess that your platform will inevitably contain the same dross. LinkedIn Lunatics are probably platform agnostic.
I'd guess that LinkedIn Lunatics are only there because LinkedIn incentivizes that behavior by boosting that type of slop. I heard an anecdote that clicking the "show more" would count as engagement on a post, causing linkedin to show it to more people. Thus began the single-line-separated-by-spaces trend. Comments probably count as engagement too, which would explain why influencers end everything with "thoughts?" or "agree?" lmao
Somewhat related: the worst linkedin post I've ever seen was a woman, who I'll call Kelsey R, sharing an image with a caption like "So inspirational, just what I needed to get through the day!" The image was a screenshot of a poem, signed by Kelsey R.
(1) the user facing feeds, the social media part most people see
(2) the recruiter platform that recruiters are addicted to, and the integrations with other platforms to this bit.
(3) the advertising platform that marketers/employer brand teams can run paid targeted advertising at prospects etc.
This will fail like every similar thing because Linkedin has the market sewn up from every angle. There's a reason Microsoft paid 26 billion for it.
My advice to anyone, get yourself on LinkedIn, fill out your profile as much as your can, join the relevant groups in the industry you are in, network in real life.
also what if you get the area wrong? the site is not telling me which area it detected for me. i am traveling a lot and i am often not in the area where i actually live. i hesitate to sign up and find out that i get notified for an area that i am no longer in or was never interested in finding jobs in to begin with.
for any area specific features, if you open up signing up to anyone with the caveat that if they are not in a supported area they may not benefit from the site, then you could use the popularity of sign-ups as a suggestion where to focus on next.
LinkedIn's value is that everyone is on it. Even super secretive Apple employees - Apple couldn't force them to delete their stuff. Talk about a powerful network effect. Just start browsing, see for yourself: https://www.linkedin.com/company/apple/people/
LI's value is not in the UI, not in the features. Just like FB, YT, WhatsApp, etc - they took off while no one else did, not because better tech, but by hitting a virality inflection point.
This is a hard problem to solve, people like Nikita Bier are the equivalent to rocket scientists in that area. And while they can launch a viral app for teenagers, the "easiest" early adopter group, repeatedly and flip it for cash - they can't figure out how to crack LinkedIn.
Think of it as a virus/pandemic problem. Who are the super spreaders that pull in the rest of the normies? What is the initial value for THEM to join in the first place? I can tell you that a special social network for Doctors, publicly listed now, had to give their initial cohort of docs STOCK in the company to be on the platform. Talk about dilution...
So, sorry, forget about the shiny UI. How do you infect and take over the LinkedIn host? They fight scraping left and right.
Personally I am so happy to work in enterprise SaaS...so much easier than the above :)
You nailed it: their true moat isn’t tech, it’s scale and inertia. Everyone’s on it, even if they hate it. That’s what makes it both frustrating and interesting to challenge — not because it's easy, but because it’s overdue.
We’re not trying to beat LinkedIn at their own game (at least not yet) — we’re focused on solving one painful wedge: helping people actually stand out and get discovered without shouting into a noisy feed or spraying cold applications into the void.
If we can win on that one slice of user need (especially among early-career folks, designers, PMs, indie hackers, etc.), we believe there’s room to build up a meaningful alternative, piece by piece. Small, high-signal networks that grow from the edge rather than trying to eat the core from day one.
Appreciate the thoughtful challenge — these are exactly the conversations that keep us grounded and ambitious at the same time.
One problem with LinkedIn to find jobs is that every job applicstion gets hundreds of applications. Your site won’t have any jobs available - that’s the opposite problem.
I have looked for and found jobs 7x since 2012 when I joined LinkedIn. Two of those jobs came from my reaching out to recruiters who posted jobs that I was somewhat uniquely qualified for. Those people won’t be on your site.
The other two were from recruiters reaching out to me based on a search on skills. Those people won’t be on your site either.
Not to mention that when I’m looking to find out about my interviewers, manager etc, I’m not looking on your site either, neither are they looking for me there.
A large part of my profile is also recommendations.
What problem are you trying to solve?
If I click sign up from the front page just take me straight to the sign-up page.
Immediate feedback:
- The mobile v. desktop detection seems based on the screen width, which would be reasonable if it didn't mean halting my onboarding process because my browser window ain't maximized.
- The auto-generated profile didn't capture much from my résumé or LinkedIn profile. Only the two most recent roles plus some early-career freelance work; that covers maybe 20% or so of my overall career.
- Related to the above, it'd be useful to have more control over the (what appears to be) AI-generated summarizations of things.
- No way to reorder the "key accomplishments"?
- A place to list certifications and (in my case) clearances would be handy.
While we are still super early and the platform you are seeing is our MVP, you're absolutely right on all points, and we've already added everything you mentioned to our backlog. We're now working on improving the resume/LinkedIn import, giving users more control over summaries and ordering, and adding fields for certifications and clearances.
Also, great catch on the viewport detection — we'll tweak that so it doesn’t block onboarding just because your browser window isn’t full screen. Thanks again for taking the time to test it and share your thoughts
I use linkedin and pay for premium but the problem it solves for me is very different. If I want to find out how to reach an organisation to do sales, I need to know the structure of the organization and who I know that knows people who work there. I don't even use the linkedin-platform messaging. Really it's about how to coordinate my rolodex so I can get warm introductions.
I have posted a few jobs on linkedin and they immediately get 1000s of applicants, with very poor signal-to-noise ratio. We don't use it for job postings anymore, we instead do more specific targeting.
LinkedIn still works for networking or sales in some cases, but when it comes to job searching and hiring, it’s become almost unusable. The signal-to-noise ratio is brutal, especially for job posts, and candidates feel like they’re just shouting into the void.
As soon as I read 'onboarded', and 'supercharge your network', I gave up (being young[er], I guess).
This could be a beautiful start for a Linkedin alternative focused on freelancers, entrepreneurs, etc. Maybe even people in specific industries whose Linkedin currently does more than get them their next job (sales comes to mind, but also folks who work at design agencies and need to get clients, and have a profile they attach somewhere in the about us section).
If your experiment takes off, I don't know how it avoids the same fate.
All platforms become bad as soon as you allow average Joe speak his mind.
The only ones that somewhat save themselves are the likes of HN and Reddit where it's all about discussing, but users are mostly anonymous and not trying to promote their brand.
To clarify: OpenSpot doesn’t have a feed, followers, or any social mechanics. There’s no algorithm pushing content or encouraging endless posting. When we say “create content,” we mean things like a short video intro, showcasing past work, or writing a quick blurb about what makes you unique — all on your profile, not for public engagement farming.
The spammers, the SEO farmers, the porn merchants won't care.
A link is a link.
I've been tackling spam for 15+ years and you will get hit. I wish it were not the case, but it is. Expect it.
If it is so, I don't see the problem with that. Sure, you'll have the fake-happy and fake-positive content, but they'll not be force fed to you.
Most links are nofollow these days. Those still provide SEO value. Google will find your site very suspicious if your dofollow to nofollow ratio is too high.
Spam is not machine-generated content?
For implicit algorithms, outside of the issues/misincentives of time-sorted feeds, there's also game theory and behavioral economics.
Hard disagree on that one. Average Joe is perfectly fine.
But I strongly agree on professional platforms allowing users to create content being an incredibly bad idea.
A possibility turns into an obligation for success real quick. I have just about 0 interest in creating 10 posts per day to game some algorithm into promoting me. And neither would I like hiring someone who spends 80% of his time awake trying to game some algorithm into enlongating his job title.
Openspot has no algorithm, no feed, and no pressure to post daily. It’s not about creating content for engagement — it’s about helping people show their real value in a more human way than a PDF resume or a keyword-stuffed LinkedIn profile.
You don’t need to “game” anything — a short video intro, a demo of your work, or just a few lines about what you’re great at is often enough to stand out. That’s the whole point: quality signals over content farming.
[1] I accomplished that for the first time by writing a news article about an event a few months before it happened.
I do not think that is the big problem. The problem is what platforms promote: content that creates engagement.
It's a site for prospective employees/contractors. How do you expect someone to advertise themselves w/o creating any content? LinkedIn certainly allows user-created content.
Perhaps not right when, but it becomes bad when you decide by yourself (or take advice from someone to pays you money) to show it to me.
Had a look at your site and the carousel seems to slow down the entire site for me. Scrolling becomes janky and it's a drag to scroll down. I'm using Firefox and also tried it in a chromium based browser.
The carousel itself also jumps to the beginning when it reaches the end, i.e. it's not a seamless loop.
I would encourage you to just remove any custom scrolling code, it doesn't work well.
However, crucially, as a peer reviewed CV machine and recruiting platform, Linkedin is... fine. In fact its actually quite good.
Being able to easily pick conversation starters is crucial and priceless for bizdev.
With OpenSpot, we decided to skip the feed entirely. Instead of trying to fix the feed, we just removed it. No likes, no endless scrolling, no performance metrics — just individual profiles curated around quality signals.
It’s not about restricting average Joe, but about giving real talent — whether loud or quiet — a space to be discovered for what they do, not how often they post.
That still works with LinkedIn (at least in one way, as it's obvious LinkedIn won't ever reciprocate).
That being said I would be absolutely down to go down that rabbithole.
Why would a Twitter user switch to Mastodon or Bluesky or micro blogging, either on a shared public instance or on a personal instance?
Why would anyone think of making a new Twitter or a new LinkedIn in 2015? (actually, it's not new, it's different because of the different premise: not a single private platform controlled by whoever owns it, but several cooperating platforms through a common protocol).
Why would a Ford driver switch to a bicycle? Because while the infrastructure has not adjusted yet, it's a more sustainable, human-sized, city/neighbourhood-sized transportation tool (which, while it does not cover 100% of the cases, depending on the situation, can cover 50/80% of those), and it gives, not more power (that's irrelevant) but much more direct control about what you can do with it, where you can go.
So in short: it cannot start differently than as a niche thing.
> if a critical mass switches over, what would prevent it from having the same kind of people and behaviour?
Hosting instances policies and moderation. Much like Mastodon does already.
The actual value/service of LinkedIn is not in the data they have (it could be as well stored in a distributed database, such as the open web could be understood as). It's in how they operate/categorize/filter/report over it (their algorithms), and how they brand under their authority (which some take as some guarantee, which they are even happy to pay to).
I don't care about recruiters. Don't need a job. With the demise of Twitter and Facebook not being interesting for professional purposes, LinkedIn is just the best medium for professional outreach.
It's just a good way to reach professional contacts.
If you replicate that aspect of LinkedIn then not much is achieved.
The real opportunity is to create a trust network for granting access to send email.
I'd really like to be able to some some sample profiles from users before I decide to sign up and commit to anything at all.
The problem with resume sites is that you only need them for a short period every X years in those months you're looking for a job. Then you never touch it again. The social features of Linkein, as awful as they are, keep users engaged and active regularly even while they are employed.
Lots of people pooping all over the video feature but I think it's a pretty decent idea. Especially for roles where spoken communication is a key requirement (community, DevRel, etc). I could see it having unintended consequences though. I suppose it is something you can change your mind about later and remove.
You can already do this in many places and it still will be more noise than signal.
This pitch seems more aimed at solving a want from the type of companies that want a one way interview (film yourself telling us who you are) to save on resources than anything else.
It's even worse when you consider that in the word of LLMs they'll still want to parse those automatically into recommendation and filter systems.
I don't think you'll really love our thoughts. Heh.
LinkedIn feels exhausting, so I’m definitely going to give OpenSpot a try.
Wishing you the best
What happened to UX as of late? We have buttons that look like labels and you can no longer tell what's actionable anymore.
Is it "modern" or confusing?
> I hope this fails tremendously. What a waste of time.
Now, which is more polite? A common greeting, or wishing failure on someone who wanted to showcase their web design skills?
And to characterize it as "wanted to showcase their web design skills". Its a startup.
I don't feel like I'm a smart guy but damn are you stupid.
LinkedIn was (arguably) a better place too before its unavoidable enshittification. How are you different? How will you remain more principled? How will you prevent the issues (say, the existence of "influencers") that turned LinkedIn into the awful place that it is today, especially if you get funded by some VC in the future?
Some ideas:
Avoid Engagement for Engagement’s Sake – Features like posting and analytics can create the same inauthentic cycles seen on other platforms, where users engage primarily to boost metrics and reach rather than build genuine connections.
Encourage Thoughtful Interaction – Consider placing limits on outreach, such as allowing only one new direct message per day. This ensures that when someone reaches out, it’s intentional and meaningful, not spam.
Resist Monetisation Pitfalls – Rather than introducing premium features like LinkedIn’s paywalls or sponsored content, a fair enterprise model such as paid job postings section could sustain the platform without diluting its core value.
Your approach is promising, and with the right focus, OpenSpot could offer a genuinely valuable alternative. Best of luck!
I'm fed up with LinkedIn
I agree "LinkedIn sucks".
What is your stance on privacy?
We, the candidates, don't need a place to "stand out", like an Instagram for Jobs. We shouldn't be "making content" at all. Nobody should have to create a multimedia presentation to get a job interview.
My own department at work has been working for months to try to find a candidate for a couple positions. Yet there's supposedly so many people out of work? Either everyone out of work is terrible, or the way we find and filter candidates is terrible. I think it's the latter. And I think it's time for an engineering approach. No more bullshit resumes, bullshit headhunters, and bullshit social media. Let's solve this problem, once and for all.
What I think we need, is fine-grained, data-informed, weighted and sorted matching. Show me the people/companies who match what I'm looking for, and sort them based on my criteria.
For candidates:
For employers: We work in technology. We make this stuff for a living. But nobody's made a simple site to actually filter on this stuff? There's a dozen dating sites that do it. But none for jobs? Despite the fact that we all complain all the time about how hard it is to find jobs, and candidates?You may not like the examples above, but they're not the point. The point is that we all have questions we'd like to ask, either way. We'd all like to cut out all the BS, like having to tailor all your life's work down to 2 pages of one-line snippets. We'd all like to cut through candidates who won't match our company's culture. And we shouldn't have to read a bunch of 2-page summaries that don't really tell us anything, only to then have a dozen 30-minute calls just to tell us what could have been in an e-mail.
kthxbye
Their tagline was "Your professional network"
They closed in early 2025
LinkedIn may suck.
Let me retract that.
It definitely sucks (For me - it sucks because of non-professional posts in the feed. memes, political rants, funny pics etc.)
But there are good parts as well.
The most important thing going on for them is they have network effect.
Everyone (and their grandma, as they say) is on LinkedIn
When I was interviewing, I used to check the LinkedIn profile for the candidate as well. (Lot of times, after the interview in case I had good things to say in my feedback form)
Having said that - Best wishes to OpenSpot.
Yes, and the network effect is both what they have going for them and what causes the weird dynamics that make it so awful. I honestly don't think you can have one without the other.
If there are enough people on a platform for the network effects to kick in, then you'll never "stand out" the way OP's tool advertises, and it will inevitably slide into the weird. And if there aren't enough people for the network effects to kick in, then you'll never get to 3x as many interviews from having a profile on this platform (the number advertised).
I wish OP the best of luck, but I honestly don't think you can make a better LinkedIn because the problem isn't LinkedIn, the problem is corporate culture and what happens when you get enough people who are trying to sell themselves for a job into one space.
What made it turn into this cesspool, is the endless engagement optimization and pursuit of profit above all else.
Talk like this.
To increase engagement.
And take up space.
They've been trying to change their value-prop from "we manipulate people into buying stuff" to "we offer useful services for professionals" by selling Premium subscriptions, which seems to be going well but still far from done: Premium sales account for ~12% of their revenue, leaving a staggering $14B to "LinkedIn Marketing Solutions".
https://techcrunch.com/2025/01/29/linkedin-passes-2b-in-prem...
https://news.linkedin.com/2024/July/LinkedIn_Business_Highli...
> Talk like this.
> To increase engagement.
> And take up space.
Ohhh that's why all the posts look like that? Barf. Goodhart's law strikes again...
LinkedIn Premium struggles because it’s expensive as shit, and people will not pay that much for a social network most of the time, unless they have a dedicated reason to (job seeking, recruiting, etc.). We can say this is wrong and bad and it makes us the product, which is mostly true, but also it means we pay less for things with more utility.
Look at Netflix. Their ads tier is doing gangbusters. They keep increasing the amount of shows that are on that tier because it makes them more money, without users getting mad at price increases.
Now’s the hardest trick in the book is to provide high quality, contextual advertising in a way that doesn’t overwhelm your users but also creates value for your advertisers. Truthfully, nobody is better at this than Instagram.
If we actually want to solve this problem, the minimum wage needs to be radically reset, wages need to grow as fast or faster than inflation, and companies need to be incentivized by the market not to grow without bounds, but to reduce profit margins and find a healthy state where they throw off a solid amount of cash.
The "influencer" in its modern incarnation is only 5-6 years old in general [0]. The culture has shifted dramatically and just creating a new platform isn't going to allow you to avoid the cultural shift.
[0] https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=%...
Because the garbage posting is actually encouraged by LinkedIn.
Not just "the algorithm", but LinkedIn's peoples themselves.
At work we had a 2h workshop with one of their "something something engagement".
They basically told us:
- post content at least every other day, use AI to help you produce it
- like every post of your coworkers to give them visibility
- post comments on customers/partners posts to maintain engagement, use AI to help you produce them
Everyone should constantly put garbage there so others can promote it so... nobody reads it because it's garbage.
"Everyone's a content producer, but no one actually reads anymore" is the worst trend happening.
The most annoying people on every platform are the "content producers".
The itch it scratches could be handled without a feed at all. Give people a place to post their resume, their publications, links to their projects and achievements. Let them traverse their social graph to view each other's pages.
There was never any need to give them tools for spamming each other with updates to this info. If somebody is interested to know where you're working now, they can come to your page and view that info.
I worked on this problem for a couple years, with vastly more funding and an existing userbase to bypass the cold start problem. So did my predecessor. Neither of us succeeded, nor came particularly close. Here's what I wrote last year in a retrospective about how we failed (with a few things not relevant to this post trimmed):
> "LinkedIn For Engineers" - that was the by-phrase within Triplebyte for most of 2020 as we shifted into the Source era.
> Job searching on LinkedIn sucks! (True.) Engineers hate LinkedIn! (Often true.) So if we just make a LinkedIn that doesn't suck (uh-oh), everyone should want to use us instead!
> I present it here in a somewhat comedic tone, but this wasn't a ridiculous idea on the face of it. We didn't need to worry about the cold-start problem (because we already had a bunch of users on both sides of the hiring process) and we were competing against an incumbent people don't like. None of Triplebyte's leadership were stupid, and they didn’t pick that direction arbitrarily.
> Conventional wisdom, and wisdom within the company at the time, was that if you want to disrupt an incumbent, you need to be a step function better. The claim was that our skill assessments and our engineer-specific functions could accomplish that. And our assessments were very good. That part wasn't wrong.
> But the problem was that we couldn’t just be a step function better at something. That can work for a company just starting out (and in fact it’s standard advice for making a great startup), but we were a growth-stage Series B company with a nine-figure valuation. We needed to be a step function better at the core value proposition of our space. And the core value proposition of LinkedIn isn't "we make finding a job easy and pleasant". It’s "we have all the jobs and all the candidates".
> No one wanted another LinkedIn, because LinkedIn had already perfected its we-have-all-the-jobs-and-all-the-candidates value prop.
I'm not quite sure what OP thinks their step-function advantage is, either. It certainly looks nicer than LinkedIn, but if you're generating a profile from a resume, what does it add beyond resumes? Resumes that are already a de facto standard supported by every ATS in the Universe?
We had a UI with a bunch of nice displays and animations and such. No one used it - they all just used the PDF export. At my current company, I pretty much exclusively use linkedin's PDF export when viewing candidates there for the same reason.
As a startup you really need a completely different USP and value proposition, look for something that that existing platforms/products don't do so well (or don't do at all) and see if there's a market in that particular niche.
Two sided markets (like LinkedIn) where you need both sellers and buyers (in this case employers and employees) are really hard because you have a chicken-egg problem and you can't get one side of the equation without the other side. So you really need to crack this by solving some other problem first that you can get either group on your platform before you can start dreaming of creating that kind of platform for sellers and buyers to meet.
You need to understand what disrupting the value chain and industry norms means and clearly identify how you'll do it. Done right, the incumbent can't respond head on.
The classic example was the budget airline model. Instead of using huge hub and spoke airports they used cheap regional ones. They ruthlessly cut costs through standardisation and pared back their offering to such a degree only other budget airlines could compete. By the time the big boys saw the size of the threat, the newcomers were dominating their niche.
Linkedin won't live forever, but it'll be something that fundamentally makes it's model irrelevant that will replace it (think an actually correct AI vs Google for search). "Better" is just wasting everyone's time.
I think you hit the nail on the head with "LinkedIn had already perfected its value prop". We all hate the culture on the social media network hosted by LinkedIn, but the internet killed that kind of highly-social networking anyway for most corp jobs (in the US?), so it doesn't actually relate to their real value props:
1. surfacing people for searches by name or specific experiences,
2. connecting employees & employers, and
3. providing some informal identity verification.
None of those really rely on the slop that we've all been drawn into scrolling through every now-and-again, only to be horrified by how banal & insincere it all is.
Personally, my takeaway is that for OpenSpot to really compete, one huge (+ hugely challenging) opportunity would be to actually do professional social networking well, and thus add something LinkedIn doesn't have for most people. I was going to cynically say that Bluesky already (re-)solved this for people in academia, writing, and journalism, but it's now occurring to me that bsky's protocol means that network could be leveraged here, too...
> We all hate the culture on the social media network hosted by LinkedIn
Who is "we" here?
I work mostly with Bay Area companies and engineers looking for early-stage startups, about as HN-y a crowd as you could possibly hope for. A plurality of our candidates - about 30% - have come in from HN engagement.
But many people on both sides of that set still buy into the things people theoretically hate about linkedin. Status-jockeying is everywhere, and insecurity shows up on both sides all the time. Founders are alert for any signal that you don't consider them The Most Special Company To Ever Exist (because they see that as a sign you'll leave). Engineers are often eager to withdraw at the first sign a company might not be a rocketship (because they want a stable job). It's not everyone, but it still happens plenty.
I'm not blaming them. This is the correct self-interested strategy (within reason) for both sides. In a game of imperfect information, you try not to show when you have a bad hand, and you look to see if your opponent has one. Sometimes you bluff, and sometimes you call others' bluffs - and as long as everyone wants everyone else to stop lying first, this doesn't change. You can choose not to bluff (and I do) but you will be playing suboptimally if you do. And good bluffs don't look like bluffs - the stuff that you see as "banal and insincere" is just the people who suck at it.
As a personal example: a friend of mine came to me yesterday and asked me about a job offer he was considering from a founder I'd met before. I hadn't been impressed with this founder. Bluster is pretty much all they seem to do, frankly (I'd blocked them on linkedin not long ago because I got annoyed with it). But my friend's impression was "wow, they seem so confident and energetic!". The bluster (or what I think is bluster, anyway) nearly became a self-fulfilling prophecy, and still might if my friend accepts their offer despite my opinions.
This call, unfortunately, is coming from inside the house. We do signaling differently, but we still do it.
Something I’ve started saying is “systems, not solutions.” If you aim to change the game at this point in most areas, you have to build a different system, not just a different solution. The way I define a system is also very important:
A system is a set of rules, norms, incentives, and consequences that define what is easy and what is hard.
You wanna change people’s behavior? Make the thing you want them to do stupidly easy. So easy they would feel like a fool to not do it. Then, make the thing you don’t want them to do incredibly hard, so hard that almost nobody will even try because it’s so clear to them that they’ll fail and feel terrible doing it.
That’s how you shift behavior.
Sophisticated users on mature platforms generally behave more-or-less rationally, but those will not be most of your users early on. That's to your benefit, because abuses take time to arise - you can get away with stuff on year one or two of your platform that would be a glaring vulnerability in year ten.
History has shown that new social platforms can thrive despite the “everyone is already there” argument—Facebook vs MySpace, Insta, TikTok et al.
I can’t predict how openspot will turn out, but I hope it or anything else doesn’t get caught up in the network effect narrative.
LinkedIn is unlikely to be mismanaged as poorly as Myspace was but there will be openings for competitors. Myspace and Facebook were unique because they were both very interchangable at that point, although Myspace was kind of like the "public" internet while Facebook had already dropped the edu email requirement, it was still heavily skewed college educated at that point.
Also worth pointing out, the edu email addresses requirement for Facebook likely did a lot for keeping their early network clean of bots and spam at a minimum cost. LinkedIn, on the other hand, basically hijacked their user's address books and sent out email impersonating those users, meanwhile ignoring unsubscribe requests and spam complaints. Which certainly sounds like something someone would end up in jail for doing (they did get in trouble for this.)
Nobody was on Instagram. They got all their traffic from people posting photos on Twitter.
Nobody was on TikTok. They got all their traffic from people reposting TikToks on Instagram stories.
I’m not saying this project will succeed but it’s absolutely possible to build a new business social network.
The next thing after TikTok is going to be whatever gen A/B/C decide are the "cool" platforms. It could be a new 4th or they might recycle an old platform, the way that Adidas and Reekbok and Fila came back for sneakers for a bit.
For corporate social networking, the inertia of "cool" doesn't necessarily have an uncool factor that needs to be overcome in a similar way.
Will be interesting to see how the space plays out though.
Likewise, I suspect Reddit got more growth through innovation - allowing people to create arbitrary subreddits - than through the Digg v4 mess.
Having a design that encourages trust (with a clean UI video content) is a good innovation over LinkedIn.
Is it enough? Probably not.
Is LinkedIn weak in other areas? Yes, fraud is huge. People lie about job titles and work dates and even entire roles. Tying in with Rippling etc, could defeat that. There's catalysts like you mention too: Reid Hoffman has also been accused of funding political violence via the recent ActBlue scandal in which 7 board members resigned.
Well, no, not everyone. I know a number of devs who aren't. I'm not either... I found the cost/benefit ratio of LinkedIn had become very unfavorable (not because of the non-professional content) and so I left it years ago.
You can also restrict yourself to following friends, and disable notifications from people who write too much crap. I do this and my feed is acceptable.
But the core issue we’re trying to solve isn’t just the feed — it’s how hard it is to stand out when applying for jobs. Resumes and LinkedIn profiles all start to look the same, and you’re often just another name in a pile.
From what we’ve seen so far, people who include short videos or unique showcases of their work get 3–5x more interviews.
The fact is we're just another name on the pile - but it's not because of presentation, it's because the underlying structure that determines how to the job market works and for what intent. There are exceptions of course, both for fair and unfair reasons, but there's nothing your platform is solving for me: I need a job, not to stand out by changing how I present myself. I see zero reasons to engage in it.
/s
I also use it to research the background of interviewers, potential managers, and coworkers. I work remotely so it’s the easiest way to do so.
Besides that I completely ignore it.