Ask HN: Why isn't there competition to LinkedIn yet?

[antfie]

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.

[codingdave]

The core problem that LinkedIn solves has nothing to do with all the "social media" style content that plagues the platform. It is a long-term rolodex to be able to talk to former co-workers, while also getting contacted by recruiters (double-edged sword that that is), and for that purpose works just fine, even allowing you to ignore the other warts.

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.

[Aurornis]

> The core problem that LinkedIn solves has nothing to do with all the "social media" style content that plagues the platform.

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.

[theturtletalks]

We need a better model. Platforms like LinkedIn and Instagram shouldn't own your content. They should just connect to your own personal website. I am building an open-source system where everyone hosts their own site and publishes everything there from short notes, long articles, photos, whatever you want. You can auto-cross-post to those big platforms to keep your reach (Buffer for personal sites), but your site stays the single source of truth.

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.

[hamirhere]

> We need a better model. Platforms like LinkedIn and Instagram shouldn't own your content.

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://bsky.app/profile/hamirhere.bsky.social

[tucaz]

We are about to see what happens when this is reality. 2025 law from Utah goes effective in July 2026 if I’m not mistaken and requires data portability between platforms.

https://le.utah.gov/~2025/bills/static/HB0418.html

I’m curious to see impact, adoption, side effects, etc.

[theamk]

Does anyone actually care about linkedin "content"? It seems full of useless articles that only benefit marketers. If all the articles would disappear one day, I doubt many readers would be sad.

(The two-way contact list, on the other hand, is significantly more useful. But you cannot syndicate it, it's tied to the platform)

[swyx]

this is spoken from a permaemployee perspective. linkedin very much changes when you 1) become a hiring manager, 2) become a founder

[Aurornis]

> this is spoken from a permaemployee perspective.

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.

[pavel_lishin]

Can you say how it changes?

[nirushiv]

Can you elaborate please? Very curious to hear non-employee perspective

[swyx]

basically instead of treating linkedin like a chore to minmax, you are genuinely trying to reach out to 1) people you are trying to hire, 2) buyers/decisionmakers who have the pain points you solve. linkedin is very good for that.

[pluc]

I think that's kinda what is meant here; LinkedIn could be much more in terms of consistent professional networking, events, learning and even job searching but instead the focus is on algorithmic feed and self-agrandizing which I think is a turn-off to everyone except sociopaths and marketers. Instead at best it's something you for get and at worst it's a tool you're forced into using.

[w10-1]

To emphasize the dynamics: (1) No person will migrate until most of their connectors migrate, and their connectors cannot migrate until everyone does. It's deadlock, for every thread you care about. (2) Automation in job applications and a declining job market have both made networking more essential, so there's no tolerance for lost connections, so you'd also have to solve those problems too before all would switch. (3) Even if users don't like it and could surmount the coordination costs of switching, if companies continue to rely on it, switching would be a career-limiting move; and because companies cannot signal their recruitment strategies without triggering a stampede to game their system, companies tend to keep quiet, so no company would lead an exodus.

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, ...).

[estimator7292]

You've literally described every pitch for every social media platform.

This was THE one and only value proposition of Facebook back in the Paleolithic

[notahacker]

yeah. think you'd be most likely to get there by starting off with something else (e.g. collaboration platform for high value vertical that needs more structured comms than LinkedIn) that incidentally has profiles and connections and it just happening to become popular enough for people from adjacent industries to start joining just for the profile visibility and messages...

[gnarlouse]

Making that a public Rolodex is the source of so many social engineering campaigns.

[davedx]

I mean yeah, it's the same problem any new social media site needs to solve

[brailsafe]

I think this question gets asked periodically, but in addition to all the other answers, it's worth noting that LinkedIn essentially "stole" everyone's address book by tricking people with dark patterns[0] before people were readily catching on, it's not like they grew organically on merit, although they've since sort of needed to find a plausible reason to exist. So a competing service would just have to do the same; trick people who sign up into importing their entire LinkedIn contact list, scrape all of the available secondary connections and tell each of them that ___ is already on the platform, and then make it seem like if they're not on this new one, their career will stall.

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)

[0] https://time.com/4062519/linkedn-spam-settlement/

[mvkel]

Like any new social network, the first question to answer is: how do you make it useful -without- the social layer?

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.

[nrhrjrjrjtntbt]

Linkedin will have 95% of your colleagues. For normies is it so sticky and useful (I feel Twitter is best for well connected people and Github more for working on FOSS with others and if you dont you wont connect).

[shadowtree]

It's a self-cleaning corporate rolodex.

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.

[nrhrjrjrjtntbt]

It will probably get displaced but it will take another 20 years of enshittification and a new generation thinking differently.

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.

[aclimatt]

What are we "putting up with" and what problem are you trying to solve? LinkedIn works because it provides value. Competition doesn't just appear for fun; it appears because there is differentiated value to be captured.

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.

[arminiusreturns]

Social gates, not tech ones. Linkedin exploits the network effects of gui-ninjas under stockholm syndrome to an anti-user service.

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.

[zahirbmirza]

Ignoring the aesthetic, it does what it needs to do. It is an internet layer designed to formalise professional profiles for those who need one. And actually, even Instagram could be seen as a contender to it. YT, hackernews profiles, Twitter profiles even, are used as professional front platforms by many. There is no need for a contender because Linkedin is a poorly thought solution to an ill addressed problem. Moreover, it is undesirable to spend any more time than needed polishing a persona that is mostly relevant for a transitional life periods. Other social networks have become more addictive to use, and Linkdin is now incorporating such features to amalgamate the broadening depths of human time wasting.

[botacode]

There are companies out there re-building / replicating the graph as we speak. Think they have to wait until it has a strong network effect / tipping point dynamic before it can come out publicly as such though.

[swyx]

yes actually there have been a few attempts: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WayUp and https://www.productreleasenotes.com/p/what-happened-to-polyw... were 2 stories i've been closer to. you might argue they are not direct linkedin competition, and yes thats the point, you have to have a new angle to disrupt linkedin, but don't doubt that all their investor pitches included a "step 3. become new linkedin"

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.

[wvenable]

> It seems there are many solutions for social media these days, but only one LinkedIn.

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.

[zeroonetwothree]

In a sense they all compete with each other. They are all designed as an addictive feed of shit to click on while they insert ads in between. The fact that the demographics are a bit different just shows that competition is working as they want to divide the market, it’s not typical that competitors exactly get the same demographics. For example, consider who shops at IKEA vs Pottery Barn.

[wvenable]

It didn't just say demographics so I think that's a bit reductive. That's just like saying "all retailers sell you crap" so Ikea, Footlocker, and Barns and Noble are competitors to each other.

[zeruch]

Network effects and an as-yet insufficient friction to leave en masse has kept LI in a semi-moated space.

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.

[samyar]

Because linkedin main audience are like marketers, CEOs and more ppl to promote their stuff and connect with other and they love it and wont leave it. But as a technical person i have not benefited from it in any shape or form except for saying yeah im here too.

[add-sub-mul-div]

The biggest sites have won, period. More or less the full population is on them now, and they're largely made up of people who are passive and docile. When it was a higher ratio of enthusiasts and early adopters, there was ambition to seek out new sites. But at this point, the inertia is too much.

[andy99]

Network effects

[xtiansimon]

What is LinkedIn, resumes?

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?

[heldrida]

Fear of missing out, network effect, etc.

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.

[conqrr]

Linkedin is less of a job portal and more of a Social Network for the workplace. For the job portal, its more popular in tech but not the first stop for other industries. Which one are you trying to dethrone?

[erelong]

Just needs someone to build it and grow it

This can be done in many other fields or places where people are wondering why there isn't more competition

[clueless]

Same reasons there is no competition to facebook either (even though google tried and failed)

[gethly]

You can hardly beat the first one to market due to momentum, time, data, user base ...

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.

[pm90]

Something hosted on Atproto would be nice

[xpe]

I'll think out loud... There is a mix of users: (a) individuals (both free and premium); (b) hiring organizations; (c) intermediaries. How much of LinkedIn's revenue comes from the different user types?

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?

[hsn915]

In Japan, Wantedly is more popular.

[fcpguru]

good idea, let's build it! The only two others are really:

https://www.xing.com

https://www.angellist.com/

[pluc]

AngelList became Wellfound and is much more startup-oriented than LinkedIn.

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.

[TrackerFF]

LinkedIn suffers the same thing facebook does.

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.

[hmokiguess]

Unpopular opinion maybe, but I would say because the market and product are "meh". Can you make it less "meh"? Maybe. Who's motivated enough to try this? I have enough hate for it, but not enough passion to take a crack at solving it if you get my point.

[zekenie]

Network effects

[nephanth]

Indeed ?

[smoody07]

Why is there strong competition for every other social media site? This seems to come down to a few market dynamics: 1. The major influencers who adopt it and bring their followers 2. New networks bring new leaderboards which attract the next generation that has zero equity on the existing sites 3. Regular engagement is critical, otherwise every network faces a death spiral 4. Engagement required to drive ad revenue

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.

[lilelvis83]

There is actually a LinkedIn competitor being developed. I know the founders of a company building a professional networking and business intelligence platform centered on verified skills & identity, and reputation. It has features that will entice individuals and organizations to move away from LinkedIn. It would be a great company to invest in.

[immibis]

Because LinkedIn is crap. Nobody likes creating crap to copy existing crap - all new ideas are ideas that people think will be good.

[lifestyleguru]

Competition in... what? I fail to see what LinkedIn is and what their purpose is. The default feed is AI slop.

[esseph]

Connecting with previous and current coworkers. Then leveraging that network for jobs, many of which may not even get posted.

[estimator7292]

It's slop all the way down. If it's not AI slop it's human slop. If you have a LinkedIn account you must fill it with a constant stream of something. Way too many meaningless middle managers won't hire you if your LinkedIn profile doesn't have enough shit in it.

You shouldn't work for those asswipes but a job is a job, so the slop must flow

[happyopossum]

> slop. If you have a LinkedIn account you must fill it with a constant stream of something

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.

[ekjhgkejhgk]

OT but still about linkedin. I wonder if somebody could help me figure this out

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.

("FIRSTNAME" is not my first name, it's some other person's, presumably.)

I received these confirmation emails on [e-mail] where NEVERUSED is some string that I've never used before anywhere.

What is going on here?

[slyall]

Have you checked to make sure your domain wasn't previously owned by somebody else?

There are sites where you can lookup previous ownership such as https://whois-history.whoisxmlapi.com/

[ekjhgkejhgk]

What are you suggesting? That someone owned the domain, lost it, and after losing it tries to create a linkedin account with it?

[slyall]

Maybe they already had an account with that domain years ago and are trying to log back it.

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

[ekjhgkejhgk]

> Maybe they already had an account with that domain years ago and are trying to log back it.

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.