[HN Gopher] Show HN: LinkedIn sucks, so I built a better one
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Show HN: LinkedIn sucks, so I built a better one
LinkedIn feels more like Facebook every day -- noisy feeds, fake
engagement, and everyone shouting into the void. 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.
Author : fliellerjulian
Score : 348 points
Date : 2025-03-23 18:52 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (heyopenspot.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (heyopenspot.com)
| hypebrand wrote:
| Honestly, this looks really cool. LinkedIn has become almost
| unusable for actually finding interesting people or jobs.
| fliellerjulian wrote:
| thanks a lot, really appreciate the feedback! thanks for
| signing up!
| JTyQZSnP3cQGa8B wrote:
| > LinkedIn feels more like Facebook every day
|
| 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.
| fliellerjulian wrote:
| That's fair, and it definitely helps clean up the feed
| experience.
|
| 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.
| drewbitt wrote:
| I still would want to mute terms. I am not going to delete
| current or past coworkers just because they became a LinkedIn
| 'entrepreneur' or into bad AI takes. Baffling that this isn't a
| thing on a site with such blatant post slop
| franceso_ wrote:
| The idea of making your profile feel more like a personal pitch
| makes a ton of sense. Honestly surprised something like this
| doesn't already exist at scale.
| cleung11 wrote:
| agreed. insane how all platform profiles just replicate the
| resume format (which also warrants another discussion)
| markx2 wrote:
| Please be prepared for the onslaught of spam, SEO, porn that is
| most definitely going to happen.
|
| I wish you luck.
| fliellerjulian wrote:
| To clarify: OpenSpot doesn't have a feed, followers, or any
| social mechanics. There's no algorithm pushing content or
| encouraging endless posting.
| markx2 wrote:
| Exclude every search engine?
| ddejohn wrote:
| Then what does "curated platform" mean, exactly?
| fakedang wrote:
| The user curates their profiles?
| davedx wrote:
| I also find LinkedIn spammy and I'm fed up of videos everywhere,
| so for me the answer is definitely not more videos, sorry.
| fliellerjulian wrote:
| Totally get that -- video fatigue is real, especially when it's
| everywhere and often meaningless.
|
| 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.
| epolanski wrote:
| You lost me as soon as I saw users can create content.
|
| 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.
| fliellerjulian wrote:
| Totally hear you and I agree that most platforms go downhill
| when the focus shifts to likes, followers, and constant
| posting.
|
| 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.
| markx2 wrote:
| > 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.
| eastbound wrote:
| The opposite of spam is machine-generated content. All
| platforms have it, at least to pretend the platform is not
| empty at the beginning.
| hk__2 wrote:
| > The opposite of spam is machine-generated content.
|
| Spam is not machine-generated content?
| Fuzzwah wrote:
| You might be interested in my next start-up; hand
| crafted, bespoke and artisanal spam as a service.
| fakedang wrote:
| I think you got it wrong. There isn't a feed that people
| can see when they log in. There's just profile pages, like
| walls on Facebook. Someone can see your content if they go
| to your wall, but they won't be fed your content. At least
| that's what I think this concept is.
|
| 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.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| Yes, he will get hit. At the same time, it's not at all the
| same problem as algorithmic engagement. If someone puts up
| a spam page that I never see, I don't care that much. There
| are also some technical things he can do to reduce e.g. the
| SEO value of any content that is posted on the site like
| nofollow.
| what wrote:
| >nofollow
|
| 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.
| winwang wrote:
| There is always an algorithm, explicit or not, "malicious" or
| not.
|
| For implicit algorithms, outside of the issues/misincentives
| of time-sorted feeds, there's also game theory and behavioral
| economics.
| datadeft wrote:
| Do you think that there is form of communication where you
| reach a higher understanding? Are we average Joes on HN?
| DeepSeaTortoise wrote:
| > All platforms become bad as soon as you allow average Joe
| speak his mind.
|
| 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.
| fliellerjulian wrote:
| Yep and that's exactly what we're trying to avoid.
|
| 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.
| graemep wrote:
| > All platforms become bad as soon as you allow average Joe
| speak his mind.
|
| I do not think that is the big problem. The problem is what
| platforms promote: content that creates engagement.
| winwang wrote:
| Hard to argue against engagment being good overall, but I
| think we need some kind of "regularization".
| YetAnotherNick wrote:
| You said two conflicting things. HN and reddit is average Joe
| speaking their mind. The problem is not the average Joe, but
| the influencer culture where users are incentivised to increase
| their numbers.
| zeroonetwothree wrote:
| You lost me when you said Reddit is a positive example of
| social media.
| lbourdages wrote:
| It used to be, but that ship has sailed a long time ago.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| I guess he'd consider Medium to be a behavioral sink too. (I
| had to facepalm when some guy told me I had to get on Medium
| because it was so amazing he got 70 views on an article, I
| had to break it to him that I thought 50,000 views was a lot
| of views [1])
|
| [1] I accomplished that for the first time by writing a news
| article about an event a few months before it happened.
| otterley wrote:
| It depends on the subreddit. Some are dumpster fires; others
| like r/woodworking are lovely.
| adminm wrote:
| > All platforms become bad as soon as you allow average Joe
| speak his mind
|
| 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.
| brulard wrote:
| What would be a good alternative? Who is going to create that
| content? Corporations? Media? I don't get it
| cryptonector wrote:
| > You lost me as soon as I saw users can create content.
|
| 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.
| ctxc wrote:
| Works only in the US. Worth mentioning.
| fliellerjulian wrote:
| yea you are right, we are working very hard on expanding to
| more countries. Feel free to sign up on our waitlist to get
| notified as soon as we launch in your area :D
| hk__2 wrote:
| We should build some sort of global network where all
| websites would be accessible to everyone. It would be an
| interconnection of networks, we could call it Inter-net.
| harvey9 wrote:
| Legal compliance. For example the UK just enacted a law
| making hosts responsible for forum content so any site with
| user content now has one more risk to think about.
| em-bee wrote:
| how does that work? i am looking for remote jobs globally.
| well, where it makes sense timezone wise, but still, i am not
| just looking for jobs in my area. some american companies may
| also be looking for people in other areas.
|
| 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.
| I_am_tiberius wrote:
| I just wanted to ask if you're EU based but this answers it I
| guess.
| andy_ppp wrote:
| I wish I could tag filter and control what I see on my feed for
| example political content on LinkedIn is largely an unfollow
| event for me. Also I'd like to be able to filter for recruiter
| content and just jobs.
| iancmceachern wrote:
| It's not about the platform itself, it's the users.
|
| 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.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| When LinkedIn originally started, it wasn't about "finding new
| customers on the platform", and I for one would be more than
| happy if another site decided _not_ to support that as a
| primary use case.
|
| 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.
| iancmceachern wrote:
| That's where they make their money though.
|
| 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.
| johannes1234321 wrote:
| There are ways to do that in paces with a way better signal
| to noise ratio. Especially if I care about local
| connections in my area. (Meetups, local communities, etc)
| iancmceachern wrote:
| It's funny, it's the exact opposite for me.
|
| 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.
| DrFalkyn wrote:
| The best place to meet heart transplant surgeons is at
| conferences
| iancmceachern wrote:
| Not really, I've been to many. I've flown all over the
| world to attend them. ISHLT, ISRBP, ASAIO, etc. Attending
| them regularly for years was not nearly as effective as
| the techniques I've outlined above. That's what I'm
| trying to say, from personal experience.
|
| 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?
| johannes1234321 wrote:
| This is not my area, but will the surgeon really waste
| time at LinkedIn? I expect them to either work (doing
| surgery or administrative work) or relax at the golf
| course. For the CEO it is a bit different, doing
| marketing maybe part of their Job.
|
| 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.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| >but will the surgeon really waste time at LinkedIn?
|
| 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.
| dusanh wrote:
| I apologize this is not directly related to OP, but if you, like
| myself, get mad at all the "Suggested" posts LinkedIn is pushing
| on you, you can use the following ublock filter to get rid of
| these posts: www.linkedin.com##:xpath(//span[te
| xt()="Suggested"]//ancestor::div/div[contains(@data-id,
| "activity")])
|
| Combined with carefully managing who I actually follow, it made
| it for a much more pleasant experience.
| anthropodie wrote:
| Thank you this makes it so much better!
| raffael_de wrote:
| here's my cosmetic filter:
| www.linkedin.com##.scaffold-finite-scroll--infinite.scaffold-
| finite-scroll:matches-path(/feed)
| www.linkedin.com##.feed-follows-module:matches-path(/feed)
| www.linkedin.com##div.mb2 > .artdeco-card
|
| my problem with the wall isn't like with youtube where it's
| distracting and inviting to waste my time. it's more that most
| of the posts are so utterly dumb and self-aggrandising that it
| just makes me angry. thank god for ublock.
| hyperbrainer wrote:
| This is great!
| pastaheld wrote:
| Yes I get mad at these posts, and then even madder at me for
| scrolling through the feed in the first place. But this is
| great, thanks!
| jeremyscanvic wrote:
| Another option is Settings & Privacy > Preferred Feed View >
| Most recent posts.
| fluxarray wrote:
| thank you.
| lclc wrote:
| Your About page doesn't work. I'd not share personal information
| with an anonymous company.
| briandear wrote:
| Isn't the point of sharing the info so that it would be public?
| seb1204 wrote:
| That is not related to the comment from opp. Their comment
| was that the company hosting this site does not say who they
| are, where incorporated etc.
| isaacremuant wrote:
| > 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
|
| 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.
| mikenereson wrote:
| Its not about the product or features any more - LinkedIn wins
| because of its network.
| lnsru wrote:
| This! It always nice to get the 101st message from random
| recruiter that ends up in a decent job. And I must only keep my
| profile updated.
| cleung11 wrote:
| that's fair. on the other hand, i'd rather use a platform with
| higher quality people (regardless of quantity) than a platform
| that simply values vanity metrics. i guess it also depends what
| you're using linkedin for.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| These days, LinkedIn may be ruining that network because of the
| sheer noise in it all.
| ramon156 wrote:
| Sounds what people ar looking for is a "professionals only" feed
| where average Joe has nothing to say. I honestly don't know
| enough about social media to say whether that's realistic. All i
| can think about is YouTube Community but with a set limit of
| subs/views
| fliellerjulian wrote:
| That's a really interesting take -- and I think you're onto
| something. A lot of the frustration comes from signal getting
| drowned out by noise, especially when everyone's trying to
| "perform" professionally.
|
| 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.
| uxcolumbo wrote:
| Congrats on the launch. Another big annoyance of LinkedIn is that
| the UI performance feels sluggish on desktop. The app kills my
| battery on mobile.
|
| 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.
| fliellerjulian wrote:
| thanks for the feedback, working on this now!!
| nosioptar wrote:
| Another problem is that you moved the scrollbar to the wrong
| side of the screen. I set Firefox to put it on the left, your
| site moves it to the right.
|
| I would encourage you to just remove any custom scrolling
| code, it doesn't work well.
| osigurdson wrote:
| LinkedIn even has Tiktok like videos (near misses, etc.). Every
| time I see those, I just wonder "why"?
| cleung11 wrote:
| 100%, they are clearly hopping onto a trend with no meaningful
| connection back to their platform.
| osigurdson wrote:
| Maybe it is driven by how people are increasingly using it.
| There is a lot more political content now for example.
| janalsncm wrote:
| In tech, I have found the best way to stand out is a personal
| technical blog. Write about things you've worked on. Doing is the
| best way to learn, and writing about doing is the second best way
| to show you know. (The first is a demo.)
|
| The LinkedIn feed problem can be solved by not going to the feed.
| fliellerjulian wrote:
| Totally agree -- writing about what you've built is a great way
| to both learn and stand out. Blogs, demos, and personal sites
| are powerful signals, especially in tech.
|
| 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.
| itsoktocry wrote:
| > _Totally agree -- writing about what you've built is a
| great way to both learn and stand out_
|
| 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.
| InsideOutSanta wrote:
| Writing a blog relatively regularly got me job offers from
| FAANG companies and book offers from publishers (some of the
| latter I accepted). It's also a good exercise to get better at
| your job because communicating effectively is just as important
| a skill for programmers as writing code is.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| Are you saying that anyone in your interview loop took time
| to read your blog posts? And it wasn't just you passing the
| standard interview process like everyone else has to do.
| samrus wrote:
| I read it as them being approached by faang recruiters or
| hiring managers because they happened to stumble upon their
| blog and thought they might be a good fit. Although idk if
| that sort of thing happens anymore
| scarface_74 wrote:
| FAANG recruiters are dumb and not selective. They
| definitely don't look at blog posts.
|
| - 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.
| janalsncm wrote:
| > Recruiters - even at BigTech reach out to anyone with a
| pulse.
|
| 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.
| InsideOutSanta wrote:
| People inside the company (not recruiters) read my blog
| and started the recruiting process.
| harvey9 wrote:
| I've had interviewers talk to me about my personal site,
| but it's on my resume so it's not like they had to search.
| JustExAWS wrote:
| They said at BigTech companies where the interview
| process is very regimented and the interviewer at most
| has an hour and comes in with a known set of questions.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| strange to think there are more than just BigCo out
| there, huh?
| scarface_74 wrote:
| Yes but the parent commenter said.
|
| > _Writing a blog relatively regularly got me job offers
| from FAANG companies_.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| okay. And BigCo wasn't always bigco, right? It shouldn't
| be a surpise many in this community may have experiences
| going back 15,20,30+ years in a completely different tech
| landscape. I envy that, but what can you do?
| scarface_74 wrote:
| I'm still not following you. The commenter said that they
| got an offer at a FAANG because of a blog.
|
| 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.
| InsideOutSanta wrote:
| _> That's just not how things work at FAANG_
|
| 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."
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| you were around 20 years ago and heard zero stories of
| some individuals who skipped the weird pothole brain
| teasers because they had clearly already proven
| themselves (or better yet, were potential compettion they
| bought up early?). I fail to believe it was universally
| that strict.
|
| 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.
| harvey9 wrote:
| Fair point. I've been an interviewer with a fixed set of
| questions myself - mostly so the company can demonstrate
| an impartial hiring process.
| InsideOutSanta wrote:
| Someone at the company read my blog, asked me if I was
| interested in a job on their team, and initiated the hiring
| process if I said yes.
| rs186 wrote:
| Are you comfortable with sharing the URL of your blog?
|
| 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?
| wonger_ wrote:
| I'm also curious about what kinds of posts were good enough
| to get job offers. In my experience it's hard to
| consistently produce thorough, accurate, and useful
| technical posts. It takes so much time.
|
| If you have the time, though, open-source is a good way to
| work on non-proprietary, useful things.
| InsideOutSanta wrote:
| You can discuss things unrelated to genuinely proprietary
| information. But this depends on the company--I worked for
| several companies whose secret sauce was more related to
| proprietary business information rather than proprietary
| tech, so they gave close to zero shits if I publicly wrote
| about it and, at times, republished my posts on their own
| company blog to make themselves more attractive to devs.
|
| 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.)
| jamietanna wrote:
| I'd recommend having a read of my blog
| (https://www.jvt.me/archives/), as I've been in a similar
| position, and heavily blogging my career
|
| 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
| tombert wrote:
| I've recently started blogging again, mostly as a form of
| documentation for myself later at this point. I'm always
| working on some weird project, I'll get to some milestone, lose
| a bit of interest, think about it two months later only to
| realize I'd have to relearn everything and don't do it.
|
| 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.
| dabockster wrote:
| Agreed, but there isn't a really solid blogging platform
| anymore that:
|
| - 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.
| lategloriousgnu wrote:
| Bear Blog meets every one of your requirements.
|
| 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
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| At that point you just whip up a github pages domain and use
| your favorite frontend framework with some blogging framework
| taken into account. If Microsoft is still a deterrent, you
| just register your own domain and pay the dozen bucks per
| year to keep it spinning.
|
| 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.
| jorams wrote:
| There's a ton of those platforms, varying from extremely
| unknown to fairly well established. I'm pretty sure multiple
| of them end up as a Show HN every year. The only thing on
| your list they generally don't do is domain registration, but
| keeping that separate is generally a good thing. Sibling
| mentioned bearblog.dev, I'll mention write.as[1].
|
| [1]: https://write.as/
| janalsncm wrote:
| The barrier should not be the platform. If you have something
| interesting to say, there are many ways in 2025 to deliver
| text to people's eyeballs.
|
| 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.
| deanebarker wrote:
| I've written 20K or so words about this idea (meta-idea?). Some
| of those words might be intelligent...
| https://ineffable.deanebarker.net/
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| I have a personal technical journal[0].
|
| 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/
| ukoki wrote:
| > Pretty sure that I'm really the only person that cares
| about it.
|
| 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.
| jpc0 wrote:
| Unrelated note, the inline images (at least in the
| infrastructure post) makes reading quite hard on mobile since
| in some parts it's literally a single word per line.
|
| No need to fix it if you don't want to but may be useful.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| The images do resize and reflow, to adapt to the viewing
| context. My phone is an iPhone Mini, and I use that as a
| lowest common denominator, although I do test with an
| original SE.
|
| But if there's a place where the text doesn't separate (and
| flow below), that's a bug, so I'll review.
| romanovcode wrote:
| So let's put the assumption to test then - did your blog
| increase the offers that were given to you? Do you still get
| offers for jobs?
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| Maybe. I don't know (or really care).
|
| 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.
| janalsncm wrote:
| I have referred to my own blog live in an interview for
| things I don't quite remember the syntax for. It's a huge
| boost.
|
| 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.)
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| > Write about things you've worked on.
|
| 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.
| symlinkk wrote:
| Good way to have your knowledge fed into an LLM.
| wiether wrote:
| I know several coworkers/ex-coworkers that are bad at their job
| who followed your advice and publish at least once a week on
| their personal technical blog.
|
| 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...
| janalsncm wrote:
| 1) Setting up a blog on your own domain is nontrivial to
| begin with.
|
| 2) Wayback machine exists.
|
| 3) People who are bad at tech jobs will probably be bad at
| creating convincing fake tech blogs.
| elicksaur wrote:
| Their point is that with AI generation, (3) is already
| possible to hide.
| itsoktocry wrote:
| > _In tech, I have found the best way to stand out is a
| personal technical 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.
| janalsncm wrote:
| I might ask the candidate about one of their blog posts if it
| is interesting. It will be pretty clear if they wrote it
| themselves.
| runlaszlorun wrote:
| I'll have to wait til later but I think this is a great idea and
| needs to be done. I think it's somewhat of an embarrassment to us
| all that LinkedIn is the current de facto place for our
| professional presence.
| fliellerjulian wrote:
| you nailed it!
| DidYaWipe wrote:
| LinkedIn has become Facebook Pro.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| In fairness, we did get r/LinkedInLunatics out of LinkedIn, and
| I thoroughly enjoy that.
| runlaszlorun wrote:
| > r/LinkedInLunatics
|
| Ha, hadn't heard of it. I'll have to take a peak for sure...
| blainm wrote:
| I like the idea of blending a portfolio-style showcase with some
| kind of network on top. Consider how to maintain meaningful
| engagement without falling into the same pitfalls as existing
| social media.
|
| 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!
| Ylpertnodi wrote:
| >We've already onboarded a few companies....with other standout
| folks and supercharge your network.
|
| As soon as I read 'onboarded', and 'supercharge your network', I
| gave up (being young[er], I guess).
| carra wrote:
| I feel like any LinkedIn alternative is doomed to end the same
| way. Because most of its problems come from corporate culture
| itself.
| briandear wrote:
| It might. But it might make the founder rich en route to that
| doom.
| runlaszlorun wrote:
| As far as being doomed, you could easily be right. But couldn't
| the same case be made that HN would just be as bad as any other
| forum or comment section and therefore not worth doing?
| test1235 wrote:
| That was my first thought as well.
|
| 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.
| julius-fx wrote:
| Thank you - LinkedIn became extremely annoying over time. I'll
| check how it compares, when I'm hiring for my team.
| fliellerjulian wrote:
| thats awesome, looking forward to your feedback! feel free to
| join our discord so we can keep in touch
| id00 wrote:
| I personally like Linkedin - it's so trashy that it makes me work
| harder to retire early to get away from all those crazy prople.
| Or at least to close the tab ASAP.
| cleung11 wrote:
| i'd pay for linkedin premium if they marketed their platform
| like this
| taberiand wrote:
| I don't quite understand people's problem with LinkedIn - for me
| it has only one real page, my profile, and two other areas:
| recruiter chat and people I might know personally to link to. I
| got a job via recruiter chat on it once, and I drop in every few
| months or years to add a dot point to the resume. There's nothing
| else on that site?
| scarface_74 wrote:
| Exactly. I have my updated profile on Linkedion. I occasionally
| ask for recommendations and I respond to messages from
| recruiters and use it as a professional address book.
|
| 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.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| This doesn't solve the problem with LinkedIn.
|
| 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?
| dzonga wrote:
| this. 100%. LinkedIn's value is not on resumes too or people
| looking for jobs. But for Sales - hence why Microsoft paid
| 26bn. If you're sales person, recruiter etc trying to find
| people or business. LinkedIn has no competition.
| Kamillaova wrote:
| Xing just exists.
| scosman wrote:
| I tried this years ago. Some advice: target your marketing and
| product at "beautiful+easy portfolio" to start. See if you can
| make something beautiful people want to share, and when other
| people see one they want to create their own.
|
| 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!
| fliellerjulian wrote:
| This is really good advice -- thank you for sharing it,
| especially with the honesty about your own attempt.
|
| 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
| yellowapple wrote:
| Looks nice.
|
| 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 resume
| 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.
| fliellerjulian wrote:
| Really appreciate the detailed feedback -- this is super
| helpful!
|
| 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
| neogodless wrote:
| I'm on a OnePlus 12 and the site seems too wide / off center
| with some of the first button off screen.
| mushufasa wrote:
| Cool.
|
| 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.
| fliellerjulian wrote:
| 100% and that's exactly the kind of feedback we've heard from
| users too.
|
| 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.
| chipster_f00 wrote:
| Thank. You. For. This. `\o/` LinkedIn is a cess pit. (see
| r/linkedinlunatics)
| ghaff wrote:
| It's all about network effects.
|
| 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.
| neilv wrote:
| Why are there photos on a resume site, and featured so
| prominently? It's not Tinder.
|
| 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.
| jmye wrote:
| Right? Photos _and_ video? Why would I ever want to post video
| on my resume? Why would I ever want to _watch_ someone's video
| if I was hiring? Are we trying to land tech roles or screen
| time on reality TV?
| NikolaNovak wrote:
| 1. Agreed... But just for funsies:
|
| 2. There's a variety of roles out there, and for many
| "executive presence" is important qualification.
|
| (But really though,its because of tiktok)
| KerrAvon wrote:
| With respect, do be aware that "executive presence" is HR-
| speak for "neurotypicals only."
| NikolaNovak wrote:
| Hm. Never felt that way. Would be curious to discuss more
| though!
|
| Now - I'll 1000% agree, and speak from long years of
| work, that adhd and autism likely make it _harder_. But
| it 's also quite hard for most people, just for different
| reasons, so I don't find it a filter with enough
| specificity.
|
| (Perhaps I'm sliding onto the dark side of the force, I
| certainly wouldn't have thought so 20 years ago, but as I
| learn more about the massive scope and mandate of senior
| execs, and the time crunch they operate under, I am
| starting to understand a bit better than I used to, the
| value of speaking in orderly and well summarized fashion.
| Still struggle with it mind you, but do see there's more
| to it than just neurotypical filtering.)
| throwaway2037 wrote:
| No trolling: Is it possible to be a good/qualified
| executive if not neurotypical? In my view, executive-
| level positions are mostly about communication.
| Lanolderen wrote:
| Depends on what they're selling. Elon is a bit awkward
| but has/had a cult following.
|
| Edit: It's about communication but also hype/motivation.
| Be it for the team, shareholders or customers.
|
| And communication can be done in many ways. It doesn't
| have to be political speak, sometimes the directness some
| smart awkward people bring can be good and being awkward
| gives them the right to be direct without coming off as
| rude professionally.
| NikolaNovak wrote:
| A glib answer would be "depends if you consider
| sociopaths to be neurodevergent".
|
| More seriously though : Most big companies these days
| teach some variation of a 4 quadrant personality model
| such as DISC or equivalent. Scientific validity of these
| aside, today there's a fairly broad acceptance in North
| America that leaders come in different types, each with
| strengths and weaknesses.
|
| I was personally shocked how many executives around me,
| with extreme client relationship management and people
| skills, are some kind of neurodevergent. One thing I've
| observed, and others may disagree,is that they can be
| much better teachers. A person who is "born leader" will
| struggle how to convey their skillset to others. A person
| who on the other hand had to themselves learn these
| skills the hard way, can much more easily decompose and
| relate them.
|
| My wife has jokingly been called the most neurotypical
| person in the world :-). She's extremely emotionally
| intelligent. She intuitively does things which I had to
| learn on a very rational, conscious, intentional level.
| She's _better_ at people skills than I am, but wouldn 't
| even know where to begin to teach them, it's just too
| "obvious" for her to do or say the right thing.
|
| Anyhoo, my answer to your question is "absolutely yes,
| but it'll take dedicated hard work " :-)
| grandempire wrote:
| There is a lot that you can do to learn these skills and
| succeed in organizational roles. It's different to be a
| CEO where the job is primarily politics and face to face
| discussion, and being a VP where you just need to make
| your org work.
|
| I think with Musk/zuckerberg/gates you are seeing a
| giradian duality. They simultaneously appear charismatic
| and awkward. It's either extremely context sensitive or
| you are unable to accurately perceive it.
| GuinansEyebrows wrote:
| I don't know about neurotypical. Maybe "sociopaths only"?
| jmye wrote:
| I get it on 2, but I'm not sure how good a take you'd get
| on that from a rehearsed, scripted video.
|
| 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?
| fliellerjulian wrote:
| Totally understand where you're coming from -- and it's a super
| fair concern.
|
| 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.
| Daedren wrote:
| If we were in a perfect world, I'd agree, but unfortunately
| that isn't the case. The cons here are far more prevalent
| than the pros, as photos and videos will lead to
| discrimination before the main part of what matters, the
| resume, your experience and your actual knowledge, shines
| through.
|
| There's a reason these things aren't standard in resumes (at
| least for jobs that don't have a focus on appearance).
| xedrac wrote:
| > photos and videos will lead to discrimination
|
| 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?
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| >photos and videos will lead to discrimination before the
| main part of what matters,
|
| 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 resumes
|
| 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.
| neilv wrote:
| Do you have any guesses as to how much the photo/video on a
| resume site is used for legitimate purposes, vs. how much
| it's used/influencing in illegal, unfair, or inappropriate
| ways?
| dabockster wrote:
| Another potential big issue is the community itself. A huge
| reason why LinkedIn is so hated is the community that's on
| there, and how the various engineering/design choices made by
| LinkedIn over the years amplifies and encourages those
| behaviors. Things like humble bragging, writing styles, DMing
| patters, etc etc etc.
|
| 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.
| slowtrek wrote:
| _Things like humble bragging, writing styles, DMing
| patters, etc etc etc._
|
| 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.
| cruffle_duffle wrote:
| > 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.
|
| 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!"
| Fomite wrote:
| People don't check your intentions before they discriminate,
| they just do.
| figassis wrote:
| Because catfishing is a thing on today's job market.
| nextts wrote:
| This ain't a resume. You'd still need to apply for jobs. This
| is probably closer to your blog but hosted by someone else. A
| way to build connections outside of the recruitment process.
| romanovcode wrote:
| So... Basically LinkedIn. Where it is your "vacation photo
| and what it taught me about inbound marketing" type of bs.
| sdhar45 wrote:
| There are several countries that demand your photo on resumes,
| especially the German speaking ones.
| blueflow wrote:
| I'm german and i did not know this.
| aleph_minus_one wrote:
| I'm also German:
|
| 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.
| atlintots wrote:
| They should stop doing that then. Absolutely no good reason
| for it in the first place, other than discrimination.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| In this day and age of AI overdrive, it may in fact be a
| more and more viable way to verify candidates.
| lm28469 wrote:
| How so ?
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| Job applications already get inunduated with hundreds,
| thousands of candidates, of which 90% are bots submitting
| for canddiates. Some companies are resorting to the
| dreaded video submissions to filter that out, but even
| that may not be safe long term.
|
| Photos may not be the final solution to this flood of
| automation, but it's being dabbled with.
| lm28469 wrote:
| Sure but I see absolutely no way a picture would allow
| you to tell if someone's a bot or not.
|
| 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% ?
| bigtechennui wrote:
| Adding a field that AI can generate cheaply sounds like a
| way to INCREASE AI spam
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| cheap is part of the factor here. Pictures aren't
| expensive to generate, but are a magnitude more expensive
| than generating a bunch of text. Meanwhile, pictures are
| trivial for humans to verify against a simple search.
| blueflow wrote:
| > Meanwhile, pictures are trivial for humans to verify
| against a simple search
|
| The majority of people do not have a picture of them on
| the Internet.
| chromanoid wrote:
| What do you mean by "demand"?
|
| 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 Lebenslaufe ohne Bewerbungsfoto
| daher eine hohe Akzeptanz [...]
| y42 wrote:
| I'd say that depends on the business area, the small
| "Krauter" around the corner probably requires a photo. But
| as this is not the target group of this project, I would
| argue that images are not really required.
| sdhar45 wrote:
| I meant it as more of a nice to have
| ho_schi wrote:
| Disclaimer: I'm bad about remembering faces. Every photo
| with a name below helps me a lot.
|
| We shall not copy everything from America.
|
| And the site goes on... Trotzdem ist die
| Bewerbung ohne Foto nach wie vor eher die Ausnahme als die
| Regel. Denn ein sympathisches Bild erweckt einen guten
| ersten Eindruck. Somit wird Deine Bewerbung mit einer
| positiveren Grundeinstellung gesichtet, was zum Vorteil
| werden kann. Richtig gestaltet, druckt das
| Bewerberbild ausserdem Professionalitat aus, lasst Deine
| Personlichkeit erkennen und verdeutlicht, dass Du zur
| Unternehmenskultur passt. Grundlegende Informationen wie
| Dein Geschlecht oder Deine Herkunft lassen sich aus Deinem
| Lebenslauf ohnehin oft ableiten, beispielsweise aus Deinem
| Namen. Zudem finden die Personaler im Internet meist
| schnell ein Foto von Dir, wenn gewunscht.
|
| 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.
| Y_Y wrote:
| In my humble European opinion, you shouldn't be including
| your date of birth or home address either. Full name is
| just about acceptable.
| ho_schi wrote:
| <irony> And a cell phone number from a throw away phone?
|
| Of course for every application a new one! </irony>
| zerr wrote:
| It's a myth or 80s thing (maybe in GDR).
| romanovcode wrote:
| I worked in multiple German companies, never had photo in my
| CV, never had been asked for a photo. This is just not true.
| andrewstuart wrote:
| Resume site or professional network?
| riffraff wrote:
| I believe historically CVs had pictures in Europe, and the
| "standardized" CV (Europass) still invites you to put one
| in[0].
|
| 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/
| yapyap wrote:
| Exactly, shouldn't really matter.
| gadders wrote:
| Yeah, I'd feel uncomfortable receiving a CV with a photo on it.
| I don't want to be accused of anything if I reject a candidate.
| Likewise I don't want to see your DoB either.
|
| 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.
| robofanatic wrote:
| You're likely great at remembering multiple candidates'
| faces, as the hiring process often spans weeks or even
| months, with several candidates interviewing for the same
| position. Having a picture attached to a resume can be really
| helpful, much like how a LinkedIn profile picture adds value.
| gadders wrote:
| I'm awful at faces, but I'm worried about leaving myself
| open to a possible liability
| bkummel wrote:
| Yeah, let's focus on the liability, let's cover our ass.
| Instead of worrying about what this headshot thing really
| is about: giving everyone a fair chance by factoring out
| possible discrimination based on gender, race, haircut...
| gadders wrote:
| I wouldn't consciously discriminate on those
| characteristics. I want it removed so I can't
| unconsciously do it or be accused of it.
| itchyouch wrote:
| Interestingly, it was a culture shock when I saw that in
| other countries (that tend to have a more homogenous ethnic
| population) informally require photos. Not having a photo on
| a resume almost guaranteed the resume would go into the
| trash.
|
| 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."
| robofanatic wrote:
| > 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.)
|
| 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?
| mlmonge wrote:
| The recommendation I've seen is to include a LinkedIn profile
| URL on your resume. This was with the intent that those
| reviewing said resume would be able to verify that a real
| person was behind it. I suppose that's reasonable, no?
| cloudedcordial wrote:
| I never put my real headshot on LinkedIn even before it was
| scrapped for AI training. LinkedIn still bugs me to put a
| picture to "increase engagement".
|
| 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.
| Arisaka1 wrote:
| I'm not exactly sold on the counterpoint I'm about to share
| but, one thing I hear frequently at least on Reddit is "they're
| going to see your face sooner or later, and they'll realize
| you're old,black or whatnot so what's the point of hiding
| photos and birth dates?"
|
| 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.
| BigGreenJorts wrote:
| My counter argument to this is that the later in the process
| your face is shown, the fewer people have the option to
| discriminate and therefore the fewer arbitrary filters you
| have to pass through. And ideally the people who are
| discriminating at that point are the people you'd actually be
| working with, so their discrimination (however arbitrary) is
| more relevant bc you might continue to experience it on the
| job (not to say that jobs where a person is discriminatory
| isn't one worth taking or possible to work past.)
| thrance wrote:
| It's not 0 or 1. You won't be able to remove every bigoted
| recruiters from their companies, but you can always try to
| make their job harder, and limit the harm they may cause.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| I wish you the best in this endeavor, but what made LinkedIn suck
| wasn't anything to do with LinkedIn and everything to do with
| becoming a social network that businesses could use to substitute
| for good old-fashion contact-finding. This damaged it in two
| ways: people started bending their accounts to be more (or less,
| because the spam problem is real!) attractive, and businesses
| started shotgunning recruiting info far past where it would be
| useful to the recipient.
|
| If your experiment takes off, I don't know how it avoids the same
| fate.
| daniel-takeone wrote:
| Love your approach of video resumes. We share the same vision and
| recently built a flow for users to easily create a professional
| resume videos themselves. Our tech automates the entire process.
| Check it out and maybe we can partner
| https://www.takeone.video/resume-videos
| vector_spaces wrote:
| My quick feedback / first impressions
|
| 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
| stosssik wrote:
| Really like your vision. The "no endless feeds, no humblebrags,
| just real people" pitch really resonates.
|
| LinkedIn feels exhausting, so I'm definitely going to give
| OpenSpot a try.
|
| Wishing you the best
| mdeeks wrote:
| Feedback:
|
| 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.
| CaffeineLD50 wrote:
| Ill check it out.
|
| I agree "LinkedIn sucks".
|
| What is your stance on privacy?
| noobermin wrote:
| While I wish you well, I guess my only question is what you
| complain about are _cultural_ issues with linkedin which I don 't
| think wouldn't happen on any other platform too. Is it because it
| is "curated?" Couldn't anyone game that kind of curation too and
| then eventually the site would devolve into the same fakeness
| that plagues linkedin?
| aleksjess wrote:
| It looks interesting for sure. Sadly, LinkedIn is going to be
| relevant for quiet a long time still, just because of how many
| people and companies are there. Ill give your site a try.
| akshay-deo wrote:
| https://peerlist.io is a good contender too. Have you folks tried
| it?
| lukaslukas wrote:
| it looks great!
| myst wrote:
| > supercharge
|
| kthxbye
| paul_h wrote:
| Linked in is a mess, for sure. What I liked from it was verified
| identities. SoftwareDev-land could maybe make something that was
| Git backed, extensive and allow for secondary evaluation of the
| claims made - https://gist.github.com/paul-
| hammant/3375fec8e204f0c7567d4da.... Perhaps tossing out privacy
| as it does so :(
| thomscoder wrote:
| This is dope!
| fergie wrote:
| I'm not sure if Linkedin is actually that 'broken'. My LinkedIn-
| feed has always been worse that my Facebook-feed, but that is
| simply because the world of work has forced me to spend time with
| a small minority of terrible people whom I would normally avoid.
|
| However, crucially, as a peer reviewed CV machine and recruiting
| platform, Linkedin is... fine. In fact its actually quite good.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| LinkedIn as a "connect me to actual jobs" as of late has been
| horrible. But I'm not quite sure if this site has a big enough
| mass to solve such an issue.
| SXX wrote:
| To be honest unlike all other social media on Linkedin it's
| actually possible to curate your feed and platform dont
| interfere. Though it's only useful for those of us who have to
| follow industry news and events.
|
| Being able to easily pick conversation starters is crucial and
| priceless for bizdev.
| andrewstuart wrote:
| The real problem is that a professional network is just kinda
| boring.
|
| 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.
| Hnrobert42 wrote:
| When I click the sign up from the front page, it takes me to a
| login page that says my credentials are invalid. Then I see
| another sign-up link.
|
| If I click sign up from the front page just take me straight to
| the sign-up page.
| ismailmaj wrote:
| I can see this pivoting into YouTube 2.0
| mdaniel wrote:
| Isn't Nebula very close to YouTube 2.0? Or if one is ok not
| having algorithmic recommendations/curation then peer tube
| <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43403377> is surely
| better than centralized
| atbpaca wrote:
| Looks like Linkedin with a new CSS
| desipenguin wrote:
| Anyone remember polywork.com ?
|
| 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.
| zabil wrote:
| The network effect is strong, but it's not unbeatable.
|
| 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.
| AJ007 wrote:
| The network effect also works in reverse. The collapse of a
| network can happen very quickly. Facebook wasn't just
| functionally better than Myspace. Myspace experienced two
| really bad things at once, uncontrolled spam and adding
| display ads, at the same time, in 2008. It was easy to get
| users to just lose their daily Myspace habit and replace it
| with Facebook.
|
| 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.)
| rachofsunshine wrote:
| Yep, pretty much this.
|
| 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.
| bbor wrote:
| Heh, gotta love HN -- we're all just musing, and in comes a
| founder of the biggest startup in this space to share their
| personal experience! Thanks for commenting, interesting
| stuff.
|
| 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...
| rachofsunshine wrote:
| Clarification: I was _not_ one of Triplebyte 's founders (I
| was in the leadership there later, but not to start). I
| founded my _current_ company, which - while it deliberately
| uses a similar model in many respects - is its own distinct
| thing with none of the same IP, clients, etc.
|
| > 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.
| blackqueeriroh wrote:
| This is excellent. People do not take the time to truly
| understand human behavior and what it takes to shift i,
| along with the way that collides with the incentives
| corporations have.
|
| 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.
| rachofsunshine wrote:
| Incentives are part of the story, but not all of it.
| Users can, and do, behave in ways that are deeply
| suboptimal in terms of getting the results they want. (In
| fact, the biggest success we had late in Triplebyte's
| history largely consisted of _removing_ user agency in a
| way that didn 't feel bad to them, precisely because
| users were behaving in ways that were counterproductive.)
|
| _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.
| samiv wrote:
| Obviously if your business strategy is "build X but better"
| where X is some incumbent on the market you already failed.
| Because they have everything that you as a start-upper don't
| have.. money, resources, visibility, name recognition etc.
| They can simply out compete you anywhere. And if the only
| value added and USP is "better" (even if that is objectively
| so by some metric) you really need to be 100x better in order
| to overcome the inertia that people have when switching over
| to your product. (Or you need to throw money at the
| problem...)
|
| 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.
| dabbz wrote:
| wow I loved Triplebyte. The startup scene in Seattle was so
| small compared to the Bay area, so finding interesting
| companies was tough. I also loved skipping some of these
| places' horrible phone screens. The triplebyte backpack is
| STILL my daily driver. I was very sad to see it had been
| acquired and shuttered by honestly a company selling a
| horrible way to interview.
| rachofsunshine wrote:
| They didn't shutter us (we were dead anyway). And yeah,
| you're not the only one! I wouldn't have started a
| recruiting company in the year 2024 if I didn't think I was
| getting at a burning need, but the fact that no one shuts
| up about that product _five years after it stopped
| existing_ was good reason to think there was one.
| nprateem wrote:
| Every business competing against a juggernaut should start
| with a business model canvas, value prop canvas, and analysis
| of the value chain at the bare minimum (not to mention lots
| of research).
|
| 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.
| lolinder wrote:
| > The most important thing going on for them is they have
| network effect.
|
| 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.
| ricardobeat wrote:
| We had one without the other. The "LinkedIn influencer" only
| came to existence in the past 5-6 years. Before that, 99% of
| people never _browsed_ LinkedIn, you only ever used it to
| lookup other people and job search.
|
| What made it turn into this cesspool, is the endless
| engagement optimization and pursuit of profit above all else.
| bbor wrote:
| I have to disagree, as HN's resident anti-Display-Ads
| evangelist: the problem is the display ads! Display ads
| mean influencers, and LinkedIn messed up specifically by
| paying influencers extra if they got people to click "See
| More", which is why people on LinkedIn:
|
| 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_Highl
| i...
| glitchc wrote:
| Advertising eats everything: It's the currency of the
| business world.
| blackqueeriroh wrote:
| There's an annoying reason advertising works - users
| don't feel cost pressure as the company is forced to grow
| forever. Plus, people buy things, and ads work.
|
| 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.
| dwaltrip wrote:
| > LinkedIn messed up specifically by paying influencers
| extra if they got people to click "See More", which is
| why people on LinkedIn:
|
| > 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...
| 7thaccount wrote:
| I use LI a lot and noticed this trend and that any post
| that looked like that was garbage designed to create a
| lot of noise. They're easy to avoid now. It also helps as
| it is obvious when someone is a content troll as they're
| usually someone completely outside your network and
| talking about super generic things.
| morkalork wrote:
| What killed it was being able to link and share to content
| that isn't your own,as soon as you could do that, people
| repost dumb shit. I don't know how you would enforce rules
| around without killing linking and sharing entirely though.
| Proving you own a domain or github repo works for
| developers but that's not something the broader population
| knows or cares to do.
| lolinder wrote:
| > The "LinkedIn influencer" only came to existence in the
| past 5-6 years
|
| 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=U
| S&q=%...
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| I've been thinking about what would be necessary to kickstart
| a Linkedin replacement on Bluesky (on top of AT Protocol).
| It's network and job postings. I won't say "it is easy!" It
| is certainly not. But, it is another walled garden than must
| come down.
| wiether wrote:
| Well I don't know...
|
| 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.
| itsoktocry wrote:
| > _post content at least every other day, use AI to help
| you produce it_
|
| "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".
| ToucanLoucan wrote:
| Does go a long way to explaining why everything posted to
| LinkedIn is barely coherent corpo-speak that means
| nothing though.
| klabb3 wrote:
| Calling all humans for duty... Do your part keeping the
| dead internet alive!
| all2 wrote:
| The last company I worked for did this to boost corporate
| visibility. It was part of their marketing campaign to
| position themselves as SMEs in the industry.
| __MatrixMan__ wrote:
| I think the problem is LinkedIn.
|
| 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.
| JohnFen wrote:
| > Everyone (and their grandma, as they say) is on LinkedIn
|
| 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.
| nailer wrote:
| Nobody was on Facebook. Everyone already has a MySpace profile
| so what's the point.
|
| 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.
| fragmede wrote:
| Facebook had the cachet of being for college grads from
| Harvard and MIT. TikTok had the pandemic to help it along.
| (Not sure about Instagram.) There was also the mass migration
| from Digg to Reddit because of an unpopular redesign of the
| former. Is it possible? Absolutely, yes. But there needs to
| be a catalyst to make it happen that I don't think that can
| be caused with money.
| nailer wrote:
| That's true, but Facebook also had innovations: it was one
| the first popular websites to ask what people's actual
| first and last name was, then use that as their handle. It
| used AJAX relatively early. It had a better design than
| MySpace.
|
| 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.
| BigGreenJorts wrote:
| Also inclined to agree with the innovation angle on
| TikTok. Was already growing and I think rather than
| Instagram, their in-flow was from Snapchat where Gen
| z/alpha were already trained on exploring filters and
| tools and TikTok expanded on that with extensive video
| editing tools and being feed first, creation later
| (default open mode on Snapchat remains the camera view).
| arkh wrote:
| Also you don't have to eat the big fish: a better, smaller
| network aimed at a specific niche adding functionalities
| needed for said niche should be able to generate some profit.
| You may not get your 3 commas exit but setting up a business
| generating money is already a better result than most.
| bjt wrote:
| I think this is an important take. You don't have to be
| Tinder replacing match.com. You can be JDate.
| itchyouch wrote:
| Each one was supplanted by the next gen for "coolness".
|
| 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.
| spelunker wrote:
| Written in the style of a LinkedIn post even ;-)
| chistev wrote:
| I'm not on LinkedIn
| mralanlee wrote:
| I hate that this reads a bit like some of the LinkedIn posts in
| my feed.
| waynesonfire wrote:
| and read.cv closed as well.
| oschvr wrote:
| I'm in EU, sad it's not available there.
|
| I'm fed up with LinkedIn
| venusenvy47 wrote:
| Just a casual comment: I kept thinking the URL said "Honeypot",
| so I was a little worried I was clinking a dangerous link.
| Juliate wrote:
| Why couldn't we have something decentralised there too? Like
| blogs/RSS or AT proto, but for CVs and networking? Some kind of
| protocol on top of micro formats?
|
| That still works with LinkedIn (at least in one way, as it's
| obvious LinkedIn won't ever reciprocate).
| pastaheld wrote:
| Exactly what I have been brainstorming a couple of times
| recently. I think it's a really cool idea, although I wouldn't
| know why anybody would want to switch? It would probably become
| rather niche (which is possibly even for the best). And if a
| critical mass switches over, what would prevent it from having
| the same kind of people and behaviour?
|
| That being said I would be absolutely down to go down that
| rabbithole.
| Juliate wrote:
| > why anybody would want to switch?
|
| 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).
| willmeyers wrote:
| Read.cv was the only professional networking website that I
| enjoyed using (and many others too). It was authentic,
| unpretentious, and without gimmicks. If anyone wants to make
| something similar, look at what they did for inspiration.
| bsoles wrote:
| Don't tell us that you built a better LinkedIn. Tell us how you
| will remain a better one if you ever become successful.
|
| 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?
| phupt26 wrote:
| LinkedIn is not just only for jobs, it's also about networking
| ModernMech wrote:
| Looks slick but your call to action is off; No one wants "more
| interviews" they want a job! So don't advertise that your product
| will lead to more interviews, advertise that it will lead to a
| job.
| joshdavham wrote:
| You can actually turn off LinkedIn's recommendations here:
| https://lnkd.in/gQHsR8ps
|
| Change it to "Most recent posts" and you'll stop getting random
| influencers in your feed telling you that vibe coding is the
| future.
| Nezteb wrote:
| Non-shortened URL for anyone suspicious:
| https://www.linkedin.com/mypreferences/d/settings/preferred-...
| smeej wrote:
| The reason I hate LinkedIn is because I haven't had one
| straightforward career path. I rewrite my resume to tailor it to
| whatever I'm applying to next, which generally means removing all
| the descriptions of each of my old jobs and updating them with
| the tailored version every time I apply somewhere.
|
| 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.
| eastoeast wrote:
| Having both a hardware and software background and applying to
| both fields, I have the same problem. The UI needs a lot of
| help (sidebar needs to go), but I've been building this
| https://thebestresumewebsite.com/ to combat this issue.
| Basically, you can write a bunch of bullet points, then
| checkbox which ones you want for different variations, so you
| don't have to keep deleting bullet points!
| apparent wrote:
| Honestly seems like it would be better to build a browser
| extension that makes LI livable, rather than trying to david-and-
| goliath them. Taking them on is unlikely to succeed, and even
| though you'll have to adapt the extension as their site changes,
| you'll be able to get some passionate fans who use your tool.
| thrownaway561 wrote:
| LinkedIn is owned by Microsoft and is now integrated into Outlook
| and Office. It might suck, but it has VAST reach.
| GMoromisato wrote:
| My only advice is to make it selective--i.e., you need to apply
| to get your profile on it. That's the only way you will break
| LinkedIn's network effects.
| nhggfu wrote:
| the trick on linkedin is simply to 'unfollow' everyone so you
| don't see their inane posts / cries for attention.
|
| I'd guess that your platform will inevitably contain the same
| dross. LinkedIn Lunatics are probably platform agnostic.
| chamomeal wrote:
| Definitely a good tip to unfollow everyone.
|
| 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.
| busymom0 wrote:
| Your landing page is extremely slow and laggy on Safari on my Mac
| Mini for some reason.
| confooseddd wrote:
| I don't want to film myself. I don't want to upload my photos
| online. My work should do the talking.
|
| 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.
| Jeremy1026 wrote:
| Currently experience lists based on start date, which is usually
| a good indicator. But anything that has an end date of "Present"
| should probably be bubbled to the top of the list. Or at least
| the users should be able to pick the order.
| ElijahLynn wrote:
| Got a message saying you're working hard on creating a mobile
| experience in the meantime to try desktop. But when I put it into
| desktop mode from brave on my pixel, it still gave me the same
| message.
| Diti wrote:
| Your platform would be illegal in my country, because it gives
| employers ways to discriminate (on physical appearance and sex,
| in particular).
| hanspeter wrote:
| Is LinkedIn illegal in your country?
| wittjeff wrote:
| You managed to make a web app in 2025 that has almost no HTML
| semantics and almost no keyboard accessibility (so very clearly
| and deeply not WCAG-conformant). Gosh, I haven't seen that in
| quite a while. Mind sharing which tools you used to make it?
| absqueued wrote:
| Eh, my impression this looks like Figma or a design tool. not a
| social network
| hirako2000 wrote:
| Only in the U.S: Network is everything, it doesn't have to be 88%
| market share. But if it is 0.01%, and limited to 4% of the geo
| population, good luck. Open up to 200 countries, people can't
| even sign up while on a trip oversea.
| nottorp wrote:
| > with video, audio, and proof of your work
|
| 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?
| eclbg wrote:
| Nice project! Curious to know what stack you're using for the
| analytics?
| wsintra2022 wrote:
| It's a lot of fonts. Looks like similar design as runway ml. A
| site to help people stand out that fails to stand out. Looks very
| clean and tidy though.
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