[fragmede]

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]

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]

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).

[Zak]

Instagram caught the smartphone wave.