Ask HN: Why isn't there competition to LinkedIn yet? It seems there are many solutions for social media these days, but only one LinkedIn. Why are we still putting up with it? I’m surprised there’s not been a contender yet, or maybe I am not aware and perhaps that could be the rub; the challenge of acquiring enough traffic for the network effect to take hold. |
It started out as sort of digital resume website where you could also build a network, but ultimately devolved into a social media slop platform.
Kind of like with FB - the feed now consists of 0.01% stuff that I actually care about. It's bots and sales as far as the eye can see.
But, then again, you can't become a billion dollar platform with all that junk.
LinkedIn is notable for not being affected by these: 1. There are no major influencers (though they tried.) The most influential person on LinkedIn is very close in value to the median software engineer 2. There are no significant leaderboards (though they tried.) Few people care how many followers others have 3. Regular engagement doesn't matter, because it is still the Schelling point for irregular life events (ie needing a job.) 4. Most of their revenue comes from subscriptions for recruiters, so the lower engagement is not an existential crisis.
LinkedIn is an always-on jobs expo pretending to be social media. Even the executives think they are social media. They are actually something else.
Some angles to compete: 1. Build better data for an underserved segment. Obvious choice is SWE, but MSFT owns Github as a firewall here. Another candidate is the top 1% of executives: they might be the major influencers that haven't been activated yet. 2. Build an identity layer that mitigates risk of fake job seekers. LinkedIn has halfheartedly tried this but their inertia might be an opportunity. 3. Build the Github for other segments: the verifiable portfolios that show real work. 4. Build a frontrunner to the hiring pipeline. If every star candidate can be identified three months before they start looking on LinkedIn, the recruiting system there will fall apart. 5. Build the workplace social media network that users actually want to use daily. LinkedIn failed at this, and their effort indicates they see the risk of disruption coming from here.
Some existing companies that are on the right track: 1. Slack. Already owns DAU for work, well-funded, competes with MSFT in many domains. 30% confident they've considered moving into this space, but Benioff getting AI-pilled will slow it down. 2. Behance. Owned the market for designers, sold to Adobe, game over. 2. Glassdoor. Useful data that LinkedIn doesn't own, but they seem to have embraced the Yelp business model instead. 3. Fishbowl. Daily engagement solved but they've backed into a local maxima. 4. Upwork. Stuck with low-end brand that will prevent them from winning this market. 5. X. Has all the pieces except for a leader who cares about a jobs board. Would need a certain kind of leader for their jobs product to get it to win. 6. Every other talent startup: fighting for the right revenue, but they almost always approach it from the transactional staffing model or the ATS subscription model. Would need someone to buy all of them up and launch a network with 100M profiles on day one.
You shouldn't work for those asswipes but a job is a job, so the slop must flow
This is 100% baloney. Almost none of the people I work with are heavy LinkedIn posters, and I’ve never met a hiring manager who cared what your LinkedIn feed looked like. This has held true across startups, FAANGs, and mid cap tech companies.
I have a new email account on my own domain. For the sake of this discussion lets pretend my domain is MYDOMAIN.com, but keep in mind my actual domain isn't some words put together that a human could conceivably guess.
Just now I got two confirmation emails from linkedin. They read as usual:
FIRSTNAME, your pin is XXXXXX. Please confirm your email address.
I received these confirmation emails on NEVERUSED@MYDOMAIN.com where NEVERUSED is some string that I've never used before anywhere.
What is going on here?
There are sites where you can lookup previous ownership such as https://whois-history.whoisxmlapi.com/
Or perhaps it is just some random spammer creating linkedin accounts with random email addresses
Or perhaps the email doesn't actually come from linkedin and it is a phishing you to click though
This wasn't "log back in", this is a new account created.
> Or perhaps it is just some random spammer creating linkedin accounts with random email addresses
This is what I imagined, but I don't understand why someone would do this.
> Or perhaps the email doesn't actually come from linkedin and it is a phishing you to click though
No, these emails come from linkedin.
So if you were going to build a competitor, you'd need to get everyone who has built a profile on linkedin and built a 20 year rolodex of their network to all migrate away.
I'm not saying it cannot happen, I'm saying it is not a tech problem, so building a new flavor of the same app and hoping it wins out is an even higher-risk bet than most startups, and therefore does not fall into most people's risk tolerances.
I feel like a broken record explaining this to people.
The feed that appears when you go to LinkedIn.com is a sideshow. Almost nobody posts to it. Very few people read it. You can (and should!) ignore it and not miss out on anything.
Make a profile. Update it occasionally when you're job searching. Forget about the site until you need it. Hit the unsubscribe button when they e-mail you suggestions.
The exception is people who simply cannot resist getting pulled into a feed and scrolling it. If that's you, I understand why you'd stay off of the website. For everyone else, it's a set it and forget it until you need it kind of website.
That's also why a second website isn't appealing to anyone. They've already gotten past the set-and-forget part. Why would they want to set up a second profile somewhere in a smaller, less useful network? There would have to be some real benefit, not an imagined talking point that disappoints.
Once enough people join, we can launch our own open feed that connects directly to the people you follow. No need for the big platforms at all. You pull updates straight from their sites in real time and move freely without losing your content or your audience. It reuses the network effects we already have while giving you true ownership and independence. This also helps people who want to escape feeds entirely: with a personal site, they can subscribe to a simple newsletter, delivered daily, weekly, or monthly with all the updates, so they stay connected without the endless scroll of social media.
Still, no one (outside influencers) likes how work networking and recruitment happens today, so user might do both linkedin and some new system if one created a more effective networking and recruitment mode (e.g., for some well-defined, high-value subset, like recent Stanford MBA's, YC alumni, FinTech, ...).
This was THE one and only value proposition of Facebook back in the Paleolithic
The question of an alternative to LinkedIn is like asking if there's a better hell with less satan (but that may be a bit cynical)
Instagram did photo filters.
LinkedIn did digital résumés.
Strava did activity tracking.
It's not zero sum. But if you're going to replace LinkedIn, you need to ask yourself: why would someone want a -new- digital résumé?
By the way, these things already exist, albeit in a more niche capacity, which is a good thing. GitHub is LinkedIn for programmers. Behance is LinkedIn for designers. X is LinkedIn for AI scientists :). Etc.
It solved the long running problems of: a) keeping tabs on people across company moves b) a public, standardized CV
Its moat is the scale of its network. Very, very hard to replicate, massive cold start problem. It killed business cards!
Maybe some AI generated thingy can attack it, akin to Grokipedia vs Wikipedia, but man is that unproven. Zero incentive for users to switch.
But it is more sticky than say a social network like FB. Why? You cant split by age. Make a hip Linkedin but the older people you want to impress, work for or sell to wont be there.
So once LinkedIn stops providing the value that gives it its dominance, and/or someone finds a way to deliver more value, you'll see your competition. That's your answer. Seemingly nobody has found a good enough angle or opportunity,
And FWIW, sure the network effect is hard to replace, but not even close to impossible. Just ask the dozens of other social networks that have fallen from greatness. It just means a competitor has to deliver outsize value to overcome the inherent network effect that they're competing with.
The same reason you get wierd looks when you say you don't facebook sometimes.
It's like existing outside the control or influence of some $manyuser $app/$website is unthinkable to those who exist within the prison ecosystems. I am a greybeard linux admin moonlighting in windows world, and the state of infra in ms land is baaaaadddd. When I tell engineers though, I get a thousand justifications about why its ok that its this bad (because it was worse before, etc), because the tooling is so bad it gets in the way of accomplishing your goals.
Same mentality... I personally don't really understand it. Either you control your compute or you don't.
Thats who linkedin draws. I used to exclude linkedin resumes when interviewing heavier linux engineering/ops candidates for this reason.
its ofc just hard to start and grow any social network and the default is death, but i think perhaps the more interesting answers are:
1) hiring is the one area where you want longevity, expertise, trust, and linkedin just had the most time to build that up on both the platform side and in terms of the people available on it
2) linkedin actually DOES put a lot of effort into Sales Navigator and other recruiting tools that basically all other social platforms halfass. so even though you and i may not love linkedin, it is the only platform to treat salespeople and recruiters with any form of love and respect, and you should not be surprised that it does well accordingly despite it's obvious flaws.
I'm not sure that's actually true. We have a lot of different social media applications but they all mostly serve different purposes or different demographics. Where is the direct competition for Facebook? For Instagram? For Reddit? Maybe only Twitter has what could be considered real direct competition in purpose and demographic.
There have been competitors, but they are either niche (Zerply) or more regionally specific (Xing, with its focus on following EU data sovereignty laws) or the latest trend, AI-enabled agentic recruitment, which as yet has no real track record.
There are pockets of resume sites. Coroflot has been around for over 25 years. https://www.coroflot.com/
GitHub is its own kind of resume.
What is it you want to see from a LinkedIn competitor?
I personally never opened an account, do remember seeing ex-colleagues exaggerating their job descriptions, titles, etc It looks quite fake to me. But I wonder what could have happened to me if I had an account 10, 15 and 18 years ago.
This can be done in many other fields or places where people are wondering why there isn't more competition
LinkedIn flipped the job hunting from job offers DB to CVs DB with networking aspect and added jobs and more social aspect later.
On the other hand, the web is insanely oversaturated and in the end everything turns to steaming pile of shit because of it. so even if something new came, it too would suck sooner or later.
It feels like Linked has somewhat "perfected" the social-media-as-networking business model. To me, it looks like another enshittification. But to investors, it probably looks like successful optimization. Ergo, I would not want to try to start a business to "outdo" LinkedIn.
This leaves me wondering, what other business models exist? What would have to happen for each of these other models to have a decent chance of taking off?
There was Otta which went through one of the worst rebranding in recent memory and is now "Welcome to the Jungle".
But beyond that, that's it.
This reminds me of a post I read the other day, https://overreacted.io/open-social/.
It's by Dan Abramov, the former React.js core contributor.
I created a BlueSky account because of it.
https://le.utah.gov/~2025/bills/static/HB0418.html
I’m curious to see impact, adoption, side effects, etc.
(The two-way contact list, on the other hand, is significantly more useful. But you cannot syndicate it, it's tied to the platform)
I've spent more time as a hiring manager than IC in recent years. "permaemployee" feels unnecessarily demeaning.
You're right that it's used differently for finding candidates, but I still don't engage with the feed.
At most I've posted that I have a job opening as a post (not a job listing). The problem is that it's heavily biased toward people who spend a lot of time on LinkedIn scrolling the feed, which in my experience isn't the most positive signal for people you want to hire to focus on your work. Similar story for hiring people who spend all day posting on any social media: They tend to be distracted by their social media fixation and it's hard to keep them focused on work communications instead of their current online argument.