Here's a question to HN: if we were to design an alternative to linkedin (for IT/technical folks), what would be the features you'd want?
I'll start:
1) The ability to go no-opportunities. When you're not looking for work, you turn this on, and you will not turn up on any search result.
2) Simple export API, with a guarantee of you having complete say over your data. You may export as a json anytime, and import into another service.
3) Non-profit is possible. A resume directory can be run by a few people with a small revenue. Trying to make a unicorn is what leads to linked-in level shit.
This entire notion of a professional social network I believe is flawed in that it is built upon the notion that it would be better to hire someone who has a smaller degree of separation from you, which makes no sense. I do a fair amount of interviewing of programmers, and not a single person I work with could give a damn about anyone's linkedin profile; it's meaningless. I just find the whole idea to be very shallow, vein, and obtrusive.
The target group of LinkedIn is mid-level managers of any kind plus the people who want to join that group. Individual contributors such as programmers will not get any value of such a network - no job to be done.
GitHub is way better suited, but won't capture the purely professional programmer who never works on public stuff.
Leaves StackOverflow, maybe expand the user profiles into a full profile (maybe already done, not using SO myself as I am said mid-level mgr).
Basically - you need a hook. Something useful on top of the networking aspect to attract ICs.
Career-focused people are on LI and use it, no matter what. Very hard to beat them by now, similar issue with FB - to compete you'd need at least equivalent data. And yes, LI built their dataset with very slimey tactics.
I think I'd prefer a very generic connection network.
Simply, a directory of connections where I can define my relationship with another individual. Something that people won't hesitate to connect on after even a brief meeting. Additionally, I want to control individually what contact information they have access to.
There might be some room to tailor it with options which control the visibility of that connection by your other connections. (e.g. I don't want to show that I'm closely connected with Bill Gates. But I will let people see I'm connected with Arnold Schwarzenegger and I feel comfortable offering introductions)
>if we were to design an alternative to linkedin (for IT/technical folks), what would be the features you'd want?
The ability to confidently wipe all data you've ever fracked from me as part of deleting the account if/when I chose to leave your service.
Please plan the delete operations as a core part of your architecture, rather than an addon you can't properly support because you didn't think about deleting data when you designed the system.
LinkedIn is ostensibly about "business networking" as well as job hunting/offering. If I wanted to join your suggested service, I might not be looking for work, but I might want to get an introduction to an interesting colleague through friend-of-a-friend style introductions.
Perhaps that could be added to your wish list, again as opt-in/-out functionality.
Generally I'd be reluctant to trust any free service in exchange for my data. LinkedIn is even worse than that because even I pay they constantly overstep and gradually tear down any external APIs (until total user lock-in which is the current state of affair). I can no longer export my own connections, ... or query the interface for basic BI (e.g. which companies in Paris are working on BigData technologies etc).
Further there is a huge problem with companies being shit when it comes to providing feedback to candidates (which to be fair this problem LinkedIn never offered to solve). An issue that Glassdoor initially because they positioned themselves as some kind of review platform. But unfortunately glassdoor did a u-turn and now copy/paste LinkedIn's subscription/recruitment model 1:1 and even spams me more often than LinkedIn asking me to buy their job-posting packages.
The problem is that there is no way of holding companies accountable to their recruitment practices. If you apply for a job you have no idea why you get no feedback or what happened with your data that you supplied. How many other applicants have also never heard again or been left waiting for 3 months without an answer from the company. One of my companies is in recruitment so I know a thing or 2 about how recruiters often are stuck in the middle if the client doesn't provide proper feedback of why a candidate gets rejected.
Pushing for transparency here would be a killer service. Though I'm totally disillusioned with another walled garden where I have to take some founders word for it. I want to see something anonymous that does not put the candidate at risk if they give bad feedback about an employer. Also it should be decentralized and without a possibility to be killed (e.g. no censorship or EU data protection law or "right to be forgotten" should allow an employer to remove a bad review/comment from the web). I think the blockchain would lend itself to such a concept.
Linked-in actually has this but I still get messages from recruiters. I'm not sure if the Linked-in flag affects search results but I can think of ways to circumvent "search ghosting." For example, I could be found without search by looking at the company profile or the connections of people in my company.
I'm sure there are ways to fix this but the only one I can think of involves penalizing the recruiter and at the end of the day these people are just trying to do their job.
LinkedIn formerly had a very handy link to export the contact details in vCard format. This allowed me to easily add those details to my personal address book, which I carefully curate. They removed this presumably to keep one in the walled garden of using LinkedIn as the address book.
for 1) you generally don't want to advertise that you are looking for work while still employed. Showing-up in results is the equivalent of painting a target on your back.
One page (member homepage perhaps) displays a list with the standard "add these people to your network" and in an absent-minded moment I clicked a few. Too late, I realised it was a mixed list of LinkedIn members and non-members extracted from my address book. Existing members, fine, they get an invite to connect. But non-members no doubt receive a message "from austinjp".
I texted one friend a pre-emptive apology and logged out. I very rarely bother with LinkedIn, and this is another reason they leave me cold.
This is why nothing like linked-in gets anywhere near my address book, and therefore nowhere near my portable devices because the only way to install the phone app is to agree to that permission and the site itself is terrible on mobile.
If you let an app install that asks for permission to read your address book assume it will one day it will spam everyone in it and if someone in your address book also uses the app assume that the linking information will be used for profiling purposes (which means more advertising by one of many means).
And any who gives a web app their email address & password to access their mail account to look for contacts (seriously, I know people who have done this and damn well should know better) they need a good smack up the back of the head with the security clue stick.
Why do people keep using linkedin? They are the biggest spammers around and have no shame. All email providers should filter their emails as spam automatically. I periodically receive linkedin invitations from people that wrote to my dev email account looking for technical support, which just goes to show that they just don't go after your 'friends' but just about anyone you have ever contacted via email.
A couple of people have pointed out my phrase "non-members extracted from my address book"... Perhaps this should more accurately have been "possibly" extracted from my address book.
I'm a friend of Tom, Jerry, and Spike. We all have each others' email addresses in our address books.
We're all LinkedIn members apart from Spike. Tom and Jerry both upload their address books to LinkedIn, but I don't.
LinkedIn doesn't require a wizard to work out that austinjp may know non-member Spike. They simply have to display Spike in a mixed-list of members and non-members and wait for me to click him.
They even differentiate non-members from members, but too subtly, and all it takes is one mistaken click.
Here's another: Trying to browse slideshare while you are cookied on linkedin.com will create a public slideshare profile in your name without you ever signing on for that, and with no UI to remove the profile. I had to mail customer support (which got back to me a few days later and removed the unwanted auto-profile).
Last night I applied for a job, and there was a link that you can click to allow the website to access your LinkedIn information. I clicked on this. I usually breeze through this because all these applications just want to access your basic information. I entered my password and hit enter when I looked at the screen and realized that I agreed to the following:
iCIMS would like to access some of your LinkedIn info:
YOUR PROFILE OVERVIEW
YOUR FULL PROFILE
YOUR EMAIL ADDRESS
YOUR CONNECTIONS
YOUR CONTACT INFO
NETWORK UPDATES
GROUP DISCUSSIONS
INVITATIONS AND MESSAGES
So I looked up what this meant :
Network Updates - Retrieves and posts updates as you.
Group Discussions - Retrieves and posts group discussions
as you.
Invitations and Messages - Sends messages and invitations to connect as you.
So it seems I gave them access to pretty much every feature except the ability to close my account and/or change the password (which I promptly did.) Woops.
This is a category of dark patterns: have the user click on something that has been benign the last 20 times they've seen something similar, but this time isn't.
> This is a category of dark patterns: have the user click on something that has been benign the last 20 times they've seen something similar, but this time isn't.
This is the nature of OAuth, in which the scopes can be different for many different clients. Not that this makes it any better, you just need to be aware of it. Slideshare do the same thing when you click download - if you verify using linkedin they want access to everything on your linked in profile just so you can download the slides. Ridiculous (even if they're essentially the same company).
Changing your password here is no good, you need to go to linkedin and then your account settings, then third party apps and delete whatever it was you allowed to connect. Despite all the failings of OAuth that's one of the good features about it, you can actually control the access.
Tip: if you're logging in using OAuth (generally when you get redirected to another site to confirm) always check the requested scopes and always remove all the scopes but those essential to the functioning of the calling app/site, which is usually just access to your e-mail address.If you can't disallow certain scopes then try logging in using something else, github, facebook, whatever, and rinse and repeat. If you're still not happy then just signup with a throw away email.
They tricked me too, despite being very careful on the desktop, one wrong click on mobile and boom. They're not the only ones either.
Does anyone remember how FB ensured growth? "Import your yahoo/google contacts to see who is on FB". What they didn't mention is that they would hold on to the email addresses to notify anyone who signed up that they had friends already, and exporting your contacts was disabled soon. Despite being officially dismissed, the "shadow profiles" claim rang true to me too.
Before FB, MySpace was built on spamming the bejesus out of people [1].
LinkedIn: what happens to when you build product by growth hacking everything.
I can just picture hundreds of engineers deploying experiments, looking at data and concluding all things that move numbers up are a success... Regardless of how deceiving or confusing the UX might be.
I read this article, which was very enlightening by the way, and the first thing I did was go to check and see if I had fallen prey to the dark patterns of LinkedIn. The first thing I see when I log on is that they're asking, "Add an extra layer of security to your profile, add your phone number"
Really?? This made me even more uneasy than before. Why would that add additional security to my profile? Has anyone else seen this on their home page yet?
It makes it feel as though they're terrible desperate to get more people using the thing. Is there actually anything at all positive to using LinkedIn?
It led me to 3 different jobs. All three started through LinkedIn communication. During the resume portion of the processes I used LinkedIn Labs to generate a resume from my profile (laziness). In some unfortunate happenstance, it seems the Labs were killed off just yesterday [1].
I don't like the term "dark patterns" because it's not something that non-technical users will recognize. Especially in conjunction with user interfaces, dark pattern sounds like a graphic design term. Something like "deceptive user interface" is clearer and actually expresses the sliminess of the intended design. Is there catchy name for "deceptive user interface"?
Also, who are the sociopaths designing and coding these deceptive user interfaces? Have they no empathy for their users?
It took half a dozen or so emails to every possible email address I could find on linkedin's site, but I managed to finally have my personal email address added to some global do-not-contact list. I have since stopped receiving any invitations from friends to join. It's really disgusting that they have such functionality, but do not allow people to be added to such a list on their own.
Fully agree with the article. Got caught out by the same nasty trick.
Unfortunately, LinkedIn serves a niche in the market for keeping in touch with ex work colleagues who you don't necessarily know well enough to connect with on Facebook. And to be fair, it's also a good way of getting a job nowadays.
If someone built a better intentioned, less spammy alternative, I think it would stand a good chance of succeeding.
Linked In asks for your email account's password, but I wouldn't be surprised if they secretly attempt to log into your email account using your linkedin.com password, hoping you reuse the same password.
If you're already logged into e.g. Gmail, it doesn't even matter if you don't use the same password, because Google will still pop up a dialog box asking you to allow permission.
LinkedIn has become such a joke now, even literally with comedians making fun of all these LinkedIn invites. Plenty of people who don't know the phrase 'dark pattern' have experienced it and know they've experienced something truly messed up. I have no doubt this has been reflected in their recent stock price--rightfully so. I hope this is a lesson to other purveyors of dark patterns, but I doubt it.
It seems like there's a lot of momentum towards people wanting a "replacement" for linkedin... kind of makes me think of the transition from SourceForge (has always been a spammy hole) to github.
He quit Linked In but not Facebook because of UI, email messaging, and privacy.... seriously? I quit Facebook years ago and haven't missed a thing, while on the other hand my past 3 jobs have all come from (at least indirectly) Linked In.
[+] [-] anilgulecha|10 years ago|reply
I'll start: 1) The ability to go no-opportunities. When you're not looking for work, you turn this on, and you will not turn up on any search result. 2) Simple export API, with a guarantee of you having complete say over your data. You may export as a json anytime, and import into another service. 3) Non-profit is possible. A resume directory can be run by a few people with a small revenue. Trying to make a unicorn is what leads to linked-in level shit.
Others?
[+] [-] charlieegan3|10 years ago|reply
Related discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9045677 and archived page: https://web.archive.org/web/20150812004139/http://www.stopus...
[+] [-] vletmixutechre|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pinaceae|10 years ago|reply
The target group of LinkedIn is mid-level managers of any kind plus the people who want to join that group. Individual contributors such as programmers will not get any value of such a network - no job to be done.
GitHub is way better suited, but won't capture the purely professional programmer who never works on public stuff.
Leaves StackOverflow, maybe expand the user profiles into a full profile (maybe already done, not using SO myself as I am said mid-level mgr).
Basically - you need a hook. Something useful on top of the networking aspect to attract ICs.
Career-focused people are on LI and use it, no matter what. Very hard to beat them by now, similar issue with FB - to compete you'd need at least equivalent data. And yes, LI built their dataset with very slimey tactics.
[+] [-] vyrotek|10 years ago|reply
Simply, a directory of connections where I can define my relationship with another individual. Something that people won't hesitate to connect on after even a brief meeting. Additionally, I want to control individually what contact information they have access to.
There might be some room to tailor it with options which control the visibility of that connection by your other connections. (e.g. I don't want to show that I'm closely connected with Bill Gates. But I will let people see I'm connected with Arnold Schwarzenegger and I feel comfortable offering introductions)
[+] [-] Sir_Substance|10 years ago|reply
The ability to confidently wipe all data you've ever fracked from me as part of deleting the account if/when I chose to leave your service.
Please plan the delete operations as a core part of your architecture, rather than an addon you can't properly support because you didn't think about deleting data when you designed the system.
[+] [-] austinjp|10 years ago|reply
Perhaps that could be added to your wish list, again as opt-in/-out functionality.
[+] [-] DyslexicAtheist|10 years ago|reply
Further there is a huge problem with companies being shit when it comes to providing feedback to candidates (which to be fair this problem LinkedIn never offered to solve). An issue that Glassdoor initially because they positioned themselves as some kind of review platform. But unfortunately glassdoor did a u-turn and now copy/paste LinkedIn's subscription/recruitment model 1:1 and even spams me more often than LinkedIn asking me to buy their job-posting packages.
The problem is that there is no way of holding companies accountable to their recruitment practices. If you apply for a job you have no idea why you get no feedback or what happened with your data that you supplied. How many other applicants have also never heard again or been left waiting for 3 months without an answer from the company. One of my companies is in recruitment so I know a thing or 2 about how recruiters often are stuck in the middle if the client doesn't provide proper feedback of why a candidate gets rejected.
Pushing for transparency here would be a killer service. Though I'm totally disillusioned with another walled garden where I have to take some founders word for it. I want to see something anonymous that does not put the candidate at risk if they give bad feedback about an employer. Also it should be decentralized and without a possibility to be killed (e.g. no censorship or EU data protection law or "right to be forgotten" should allow an employer to remove a bad review/comment from the web). I think the blockchain would lend itself to such a concept.
[+] [-] zamalek|10 years ago|reply
Linked-in actually has this but I still get messages from recruiters. I'm not sure if the Linked-in flag affects search results but I can think of ways to circumvent "search ghosting." For example, I could be found without search by looking at the company profile or the connections of people in my company.
I'm sure there are ways to fix this but the only one I can think of involves penalizing the recruiter and at the end of the day these people are just trying to do their job.
[+] [-] mcculley|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lmm|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] swatthatfly|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ino|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] austinjp|10 years ago|reply
One page (member homepage perhaps) displays a list with the standard "add these people to your network" and in an absent-minded moment I clicked a few. Too late, I realised it was a mixed list of LinkedIn members and non-members extracted from my address book. Existing members, fine, they get an invite to connect. But non-members no doubt receive a message "from austinjp".
I texted one friend a pre-emptive apology and logged out. I very rarely bother with LinkedIn, and this is another reason they leave me cold.
[+] [-] dspillett|10 years ago|reply
This is why nothing like linked-in gets anywhere near my address book, and therefore nowhere near my portable devices because the only way to install the phone app is to agree to that permission and the site itself is terrible on mobile.
If you let an app install that asks for permission to read your address book assume it will one day it will spam everyone in it and if someone in your address book also uses the app assume that the linking information will be used for profiling purposes (which means more advertising by one of many means).
And any who gives a web app their email address & password to access their mail account to look for contacts (seriously, I know people who have done this and damn well should know better) they need a good smack up the back of the head with the security clue stick.
[+] [-] rpgmaker|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] austinjp|10 years ago|reply
I'm a friend of Tom, Jerry, and Spike. We all have each others' email addresses in our address books.
We're all LinkedIn members apart from Spike. Tom and Jerry both upload their address books to LinkedIn, but I don't.
LinkedIn doesn't require a wizard to work out that austinjp may know non-member Spike. They simply have to display Spike in a mixed-list of members and non-members and wait for me to click him.
They even differentiate non-members from members, but too subtly, and all it takes is one mistaken click.
[+] [-] jrowley|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chinathrow|10 years ago|reply
There, we have a winner!
[+] [-] 0x0|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] micwawa|10 years ago|reply
iCIMS would like to access some of your LinkedIn info:
YOUR PROFILE OVERVIEW
YOUR FULL PROFILE
YOUR EMAIL ADDRESS
YOUR CONNECTIONS
YOUR CONTACT INFO
NETWORK UPDATES
GROUP DISCUSSIONS
INVITATIONS AND MESSAGES
So I looked up what this meant :
Network Updates - Retrieves and posts updates as you.
Group Discussions - Retrieves and posts group discussions as you.
Invitations and Messages - Sends messages and invitations to connect as you.
So it seems I gave them access to pretty much every feature except the ability to close my account and/or change the password (which I promptly did.) Woops.
This is a category of dark patterns: have the user click on something that has been benign the last 20 times they've seen something similar, but this time isn't.
[+] [-] leejo|10 years ago|reply
This is the nature of OAuth, in which the scopes can be different for many different clients. Not that this makes it any better, you just need to be aware of it. Slideshare do the same thing when you click download - if you verify using linkedin they want access to everything on your linked in profile just so you can download the slides. Ridiculous (even if they're essentially the same company).
Changing your password here is no good, you need to go to linkedin and then your account settings, then third party apps and delete whatever it was you allowed to connect. Despite all the failings of OAuth that's one of the good features about it, you can actually control the access.
Tip: if you're logging in using OAuth (generally when you get redirected to another site to confirm) always check the requested scopes and always remove all the scopes but those essential to the functioning of the calling app/site, which is usually just access to your e-mail address.If you can't disallow certain scopes then try logging in using something else, github, facebook, whatever, and rinse and repeat. If you're still not happy then just signup with a throw away email.
[+] [-] notlisted|10 years ago|reply
Does anyone remember how FB ensured growth? "Import your yahoo/google contacts to see who is on FB". What they didn't mention is that they would hold on to the email addresses to notify anyone who signed up that they had friends already, and exporting your contacts was disabled soon. Despite being officially dismissed, the "shadow profiles" claim rang true to me too.
Before FB, MySpace was built on spamming the bejesus out of people [1].
[1] http://gawker.com/199924/myspace-the-business-of-spam-20-exh...
[+] [-] sherifmansour|10 years ago|reply
I can just picture hundreds of engineers deploying experiments, looking at data and concluding all things that move numbers up are a success... Regardless of how deceiving or confusing the UX might be.
[+] [-] JustSomeNobody|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] CrimsnBlade|10 years ago|reply
Really?? This made me even more uneasy than before. Why would that add additional security to my profile? Has anyone else seen this on their home page yet?
[+] [-] lordCarbonFiber|10 years ago|reply
Im all for jumping on the bash LinkedIn train, but let's be reasonable here.
[+] [-] kennydude|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jk563|10 years ago|reply
So, positives are there for me so far.
[1] http://techcabal.com/2016/02/08/linkedin-has-quietly-killed-...
[+] [-] mojuba|10 years ago|reply
https://security.google.com/settings/security/permissions
[+] [-] cpeterso|10 years ago|reply
Also, who are the sociopaths designing and coding these deceptive user interfaces? Have they no empathy for their users?
[+] [-] vletmixutechre|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mwagstaff|10 years ago|reply
Unfortunately, LinkedIn serves a niche in the market for keeping in touch with ex work colleagues who you don't necessarily know well enough to connect with on Facebook. And to be fair, it's also a good way of getting a job nowadays.
If someone built a better intentioned, less spammy alternative, I think it would stand a good chance of succeeding.
[+] [-] biot|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] llamataboot|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cpeterso|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wfunction|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ginko|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] joesmo|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] swalsh|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chinathrow|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] shitgoose|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|10 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] anonymousguy|10 years ago|reply