Curious why someone else can't just make a new LinkedIn...
Profiles, connections, endorsements, recommendations, and a job board. Simple messages between connections.
Is the value that LinkedIn hit some sort of critical mass that can't be challenged now?
Frankly with all the spam, and all the low-value crap, and all the really fucking weird posts about people bragging about loving their jobs, or wanting to say they get up at 3:30 AM to run a daily marathon before breakfast, or just flat out treating their jobs like cults... it's all such trash content. Seems like if someone were to open an alternative that it wouldn't be too hard to fill it with bodies.
Is Indeed any better? They're just a job board, right?
LinkedIn claims it has "1 billion members in more than 200 countries and territories worldwide". You can build a similar platform, but you cannot get the network effect of one billion people that easily.
Honestly, if you just block or ignore the feed, the other features - profile, social graph, messages, job postings - are basically fine. My biggest complaints on the job seeking side are the mediocre recommendation system and the lack of high quality level and compensation data for roles (like levels.fyi has); on the hiring side, a good recommender would also be helpful, as would better filtering tools. But if you want to replace LinkedIn as the primary sourcing tool for many roles, solving those problems is the easy part - the hard part, like you said, is building up a two-sided network at anywhere LinkedIn's scale.
Would you sign up, make a profile, and respond to messages on a new LinkedIn alternative that has no first-party job listings and no recruiters for companies you'd want to work for? Most people's answer seems to be no, based on all of the failed LinkedIn competitors that have been tried over the years.
