Show HN: LinkedIn sucks, so I built a better one
385 comments
·March 23, 2025DeathArrow
What would be an argument that this platform sucks less?
I don't want to record videos of me presenting myself.
LinkedIn seems simple. I post a CV and I toggle if I am open to work or not. Recruiters can find me and I can search for jobs and apply to them. That is all the functionality I need apart from having lots of jobs available on the platform.
fliellerjulian
Totally valid — if LinkedIn is working for you, that’s awesome.
The reason OpenSpot might "suck less" for some is because it focuses only on one thing: helping people stand out. No feed, no fluff, no algorithm — just a clean, curated profile where you can show off your skills, projects, and intent in a way that cuts through the noise.
And to be clear: you don’t have to record a video. That’s optional. Some people link to projects, write a short blurb, or just highlight their strengths in a more human way than a traditional CV.
It’s not a LinkedIn replacement — it’s an alternative for those who feel like they’re getting buried in the system and want more visibility without the social media layer.
Appreciate the honest question!
oytis
> But I always wondered: why isn’t there a platform designed to help you stand out like that?
Obviously, because if you make a whole platform like that, nobody stands out any more, but everyone if forced to do more (unpaid) work than they did before. For the recruiters/hiring managers it is impossible to process video and audio at scale either.
fliellerjulian
Totally fair point — and one we’ve thought a lot about.
The goal with OpenSpot isn’t to force everyone to do more unpaid work or replace resumes entirely — it’s to give people who want to stand out an easy, high-signal way to do so, especially if they’re not getting traction through traditional means.
For recruiters, the platform is curated and searchable, so they’re not sifting through hundreds of TikTok-style intros — they’re seeing real signals of quality, with depth if they want it.
We're not trying to increase the noise — we're trying to cut through it.
neilv
Why are there photos on a resume site, and featured so prominently? It's not Tinder.
US HR used to throw away any photos that people attached to resumes. (Usually someone attaching a photo was a recent immigrant, who didn't know the US convention.)
I've even heard rumors that some companies/screeners had a policy of throwing away resumes that included photos or other gratuitous information that could be the basis for illegal/problematic discrimination.
"Because LinkedIn does it" isn't a good argument, because LinkedIn is pretty awful, and the only things going for it are: (1) the majority of people are on it, and (2) recruiters sometimes search/spam there.
Some social media sites do photos because they pander to the worst. Or, in the case of one prominent social media site, infamously because the original inspiration was to catalog the best-looking women at their college.
Unless you're a headshots site/app for hiring models/actors, best to go with content-of-their-character, and all that.
gadders
Yeah, I'd feel uncomfortable receiving a CV with a photo on it. I don't want to be accused of anything if I reject a candidate. Likewise I don't want to see your DoB either.
It is surprising how culturally specific this is though - I've had CVs for hiring in our offshore centre in India where a candidate listed his father's details as a contact.
crossroadsguy
I am from India and an US based MNC's HR reached back to me and asked me to put a photo, my permanent address, DoB, and passport number. And I did, because the other way was to not go through that interview and possibly being blacklisted by that company. It used to be a norm here (improving but not so much), what wasn't normal was an international MNC demanding that right in the beginning. We are often asked for alternate contact details - it's a field and they must as you fill it! I literally don't have anyone like that so I just add my secondary mobile number.
gadders
I think sometimes companies will ask for passports for the purpose of visa checking, but hopefully that doesn't get as far as the hiring manager once the paperwork is all confirmed.
stuaxo
In India they will have been listing the fathers contact for exactly the reasons you should not have their fathers contact.
itchyouch
Interestingly, it was a culture shock when I saw that in other countries (that tend to have a more homogenous ethnic population) informally require photos. Not having a photo on a resume almost guaranteed the resume would go into the trash.
Even more of a culture shock was how much more open people are about their biases in those cases. "We can't have someone short doing job X, or they don't have a friendly face for Y, etc."
prawn
Several years ago, I had a Dutch girl apply for a traineeship-level position with my business in Australia, and she included a number of photos, including a 'glamour' shot of her straddling a chair. Quite bizarre.
account42
The reality is that for many jobs the appearance actually does matter.
thenthenthen
100% My partner had chestnut brown painted hair, she had to wear a black wig in order to work at 711 in China.
null
robofanatic
You're likely great at remembering multiple candidates' faces, as the hiring process often spans weeks or even months, with several candidates interviewing for the same position. Having a picture attached to a resume can be really helpful, much like how a LinkedIn profile picture adds value.
gadders
I'm awful at faces, but I'm worried about leaving myself open to a possible liability
riffraff
I believe historically CVs had pictures in Europe, and the "standardized" CV (Europass) still invites you to put one in[0].
Most people I spoke with said if you show up with Europass it's considered a negative flag, but I suppose it may still be useful for some "less modern" jobs.
BossingAround
Why would it be considered a negative flag? I've been using it my whole professional life (~15 years, multiple jobs) and never had an issue with it.
It's just a PDF in the end.
rad_gruchalski
“Standard EU CV”… why doesn’t that surprise me. At least it’s not required by law. Yet. Don’t send photos.
Arisaka1
I'm not exactly sold on the counterpoint I'm about to share but, one thing I hear frequently at least on Reddit is "they're going to see your face sooner or later, and they'll realize you're old,black or whatnot so what's the point of hiding photos and birth dates?"
For example, and I can only speak in anecdotes from my experience job searching in Greece, I had HR reps asking me my birth date, or when I'm gonna get married (I'm single).
So it's like, people who will discriminate on me exist, and I can only work on my real skills.
BigGreenJorts
My counter argument to this is that the later in the process your face is shown, the fewer people have the option to discriminate and therefore the fewer arbitrary filters you have to pass through. And ideally the people who are discriminating at that point are the people you'd actually be working with, so their discrimination (however arbitrary) is more relevant bc you might continue to experience it on the job (not to say that jobs where a person is discriminatory isn't one worth taking or possible to work past.)
thrance
It's not 0 or 1. You won't be able to remove every bigoted recruiters from their companies, but you can always try to make their job harder, and limit the harm they may cause.
fliellerjulian
Totally understand where you're coming from — and it's a super fair concern.
We're not trying to turn hiring into a popularity contest or a casting call. The point of video or a photo isn’t to favor looks — it’s to give people a chance to show personality, communication skills, or walk through a project — especially in roles where that matters (e.g. PMs, founders, designers, etc.).
That said, both video and photo are optional. We’ve seen that for many candidates, especially those early in their careers or from non-traditional backgrounds, a short video can dramatically increase response rates — not because of appearance, but because it humanizes them and cuts through the noise of generic applications.
We’re 100% aligned that character and substance matter most — we just want to give people more ways to show that, not perform for it.
dabockster
Another potential big issue is the community itself. A huge reason why LinkedIn is so hated is the community that's on there, and how the various engineering/design choices made by LinkedIn over the years amplifies and encourages those behaviors. Things like humble bragging, writing styles, DMing patters, etc etc etc.
And I don't know if building another platform with a feed will solve that problem. Because the existence of a social feed itself might be the issue here. But then what do you have if you don't have a feed? Is that a "platform" anymore if all that's on there are peoples' resumes?
I feel that building the next LinkedIn is really building the next LinkedIn community. That can't necessarily be done through computer code. I mean, look at the kind of community building that it took to build out HN.
slowtrek
Things like humble bragging, writing styles, DMing patters, etc etc etc.
This exists because there is limited courage to call this out. There are not many polite ways to tell someone this, you would need people in their life to pull them aside and point it out. It's very similar to being the friend that pulls someone outside and explains they need to brush their teeth (someone has to do this, with love). Maybe more working professionals need to blog about this so the broader community can be educated on behavior when it comes to excess vanity and general manners.
For example, it's simply rude to broadcast your new job when some people are struggling with it (will they ever get one? will they get fired? are they good enough?). Just the very fact that there are "some" should be enough to kickstart one's manners, even if that "some" is not a lot of people.
It's simply rude to continuously market things (anything) when there are people literally ... stressing themselves over the pressure of competition. Again, as an example, a person constantly marketing their looks is putting stress and pressure on many others - this is a simple fact. The same goes for those with wealth and opportunity.
Daedren
If we were in a perfect world, I'd agree, but unfortunately that isn't the case. The cons here are far more prevalent than the pros, as photos and videos will lead to discrimination before the main part of what matters, the resumé, your experience and your actual knowledge, shines through.
There's a reason these things aren't standard in resumés (at least for jobs that don't have a focus on appearance).
johnnyanmac
>photos and videos will lead to discrimination before the main part of what matters,
We're in such a connected age that anyone wanting to know your face can 99% of the time just google your name. That was an issue talked about even 20 years ago in my grade school days of Myspace.
Unless you legitmately have no photo of yourself on the internet (including LinkdIn), adding a photo here will not give or take much away from a malicious actor.
>There's a reason these things aren't standard in resumés
because companies are so scared of litigation that they won't even give feedback anymore. It's not a particularly good reason if we're being honest.
xedrac
> photos and videos will lead to discrimination
I feel like video will help mitigate this, as personalty and soft skills are communicated better that way. But if a company is going to discriminate based on a video, then they are going to discriminate when they interview you in person, no?
neilv
Do you have any guesses as to how much the photo/video on a resume site is used for legitimate purposes, vs. how much it's used/influencing in illegal, unfair, or inappropriate ways?
Fomite
People don't check your intentions before they discriminate, they just do.
fliellerjulian
Totally hear you — and I really appreciate how thoughtfully you laid this out.
Photos are not required on OpenSpot - We included them because some people want to humanize their profile — but we’re also very aware of the bias/discrimination concerns, especially in the U.S.
The intent isn’t to mimic LinkedIn or create a polished image-centric profile like a dating app — it’s to offer optional ways for people to show who they are, beyond just a list of bullet points. For some, that’s a photo. For others, it’s a project demo or a short intro about their work.
That said, we’re actively listening and learning. If we find that photos do more harm than good — especially around bias or UX — we’re open to evolving that part of the product.
Thanks again for the thoughtful take — this kind of feedback makes the product better.
cloudedcordial
I never put my real headshot on LinkedIn even before it was scrapped for AI training. LinkedIn still bugs me to put a picture to "increase engagement".
Putting headshot in resumes is not expected and even cringe in my country, but some countries expect headshots and other highly personal info. No thanks.
sdhar45
There are several countries that demand your photo on resumes, especially the German speaking ones.
chromanoid
What do you mean by "demand"?
https://bewerbung.com/lebenslauf-ohne-bewerbungsfoto/
> Eine Bewerbung ohne Foto zu verschicken, ist in den vergangenen Jahren zu einem regelrechten Trend geworden. Bei vielen Personalern genießen Lebensläufe ohne Bewerbungsfoto daher eine hohe Akzeptanz [...]
ho_schi
Disclaimer: I’m bad about remembering faces. Every photo with a name below helps me a lot.
We shall not copy everything from America.
And the site goes on…
Trotzdem ist die Bewerbung ohne Foto nach wie vor eher die Ausnahme als die Regel. Denn ein sympathisches Bild erweckt einen guten ersten Eindruck. Somit wird Deine Bewerbung mit einer positiveren Grundeinstellung gesichtet, was zum Vorteil werden kann.
Richtig gestaltet, drückt das Bewerberbild außerdem Professionalität aus, lässt Deine Persönlichkeit erkennen und verdeutlicht, dass Du zur Unternehmenskultur passt. Grundlegende Informationen wie Dein Geschlecht oder Deine Herkunft lassen sich aus Deinem Lebenslauf ohnehin oft ableiten, beispielsweise aus Deinem Namen. Zudem finden die Personaler im Internet meist schnell ein Foto von Dir, wenn gewünscht.
y42
I'd say that depends on the business area, the small "Krauter" around the corner probably requires a photo. But as this is not the target group of this project, I would argue that images are not really required.
sdhar45
I meant it as more of a nice to have
blueflow
I'm german and i did not know this.
aleph_minus_one
I'm also German:
In former days (until perhaps the end of the 90s) sending in a photo as part of an application was expected. But by now the customs have changed.
romanovcode
I worked in multiple German companies, never had photo in my CV, never had been asked for a photo. This is just not true.
zerr
It's a myth or 80s thing (maybe in GDR).
varispeed
[flagged]
OhNoNotAgain_99
[dead]
atlintots
They should stop doing that then. Absolutely no good reason for it in the first place, other than discrimination.
johnnyanmac
In this day and age of AI overdrive, it may in fact be a more and more viable way to verify candidates.
nextts
This ain't a resume. You'd still need to apply for jobs. This is probably closer to your blog but hosted by someone else. A way to build connections outside of the recruitment process.
romanovcode
So... Basically LinkedIn. Where it is your "vacation photo and what it taught me about inbound marketing" type of bs.
nextts
Well if it is BS or not is a culture issue. LinkedIn has a culture (as does X as does Facebook as does Reddit as does Youtube).
That is hard to prescribe and those tech giants probably don't care much what it is as long as people are engaged.
janalsncm
In tech, I have found the best way to stand out is a personal technical blog. Write about things you’ve worked on. Doing is the best way to learn, and writing about doing is the second best way to show you know. (The first is a demo.)
The LinkedIn feed problem can be solved by not going to the feed.
ChrisMarshallNY
I have a personal technical journal[0].
Pretty sure that I’m really the only person that cares about it. That’s fine with me. I write for myself. Much of what I’ve written has “aged out,” by now (for example, I have a series on the Swift Programming Language[1], that may reflect dated observations).
When I write stuff, it helps me to “firm up” my own knowledge and understanding.
I’m no longer seeking work, but have a LinkedIn profile, so anyone that wants to know me, can get an idea. I basically stay away from LI. Every now and then, I may make a post, when I do a release of something .
janalsncm
I have referred to my own blog live in an interview for things I don’t quite remember the syntax for. It’s a huge boost.
I also will check out candidates’ blogs if they list them. Some people have “blogs” but the content is mostly throwaway or hello world, but anything more than that is impressive to me. (Same thing with GitHub, hopefully it contains more than just forks of various repos with minimal diffs.)
ukoki
> Pretty sure that I’m really the only person that cares about it.
Even if you don't get any useful organic traffic, I find having a technical blog is useful so that when you do go to interviews or submit resumes, hirers can read your blog and quickly establish that you know what you are talking about.
jpc0
Unrelated note, the inline images (at least in the infrastructure post) makes reading quite hard on mobile since in some parts it's literally a single word per line.
No need to fix it if you don't want to but may be useful.
ChrisMarshallNY
The images do resize and reflow, to adapt to the viewing context. My phone is an iPhone Mini, and I use that as a lowest common denominator, although I do test with an original SE.
But if there's a place where the text doesn't separate (and flow below), that's a bug, so I'll review.
romanovcode
So let's put the assumption to test then - did your blog increase the offers that were given to you? Do you still get offers for jobs?
ChrisMarshallNY
Maybe. I don't know (or really care).
There was a link to a post, here, some time ago, that was about why we should write, and it was mostly for self-benefit. That's why I do it. I'm retired, and spend time learning and honing my skills. I write code for free, for folks that can't afford folks like me. I like to do a good job at it, and I like learning new stuff.
I've found that writing [tutorials, especially] is a great way for me to learn.
wiether
I know several coworkers/ex-coworkers that are bad at their job who followed your advice and publish at least once a week on their personal technical blog.
Except that it's 100% AI generated.
So it's only a matter a time before having a personal technical blog is seen as average as having a LinkedIn & GitHub account...
janalsncm
1) Setting up a blog on your own domain is nontrivial to begin with.
2) Wayback machine exists.
3) People who are bad at tech jobs will probably be bad at creating convincing fake tech blogs.
whatnow37373
> Setting up a blog on your own domain is nontrivial to begin with.
For a dev? Surely you are not being serious.
elicksaur
Their point is that with AI generation, (3) is already possible to hide.
InsideOutSanta
Writing a blog relatively regularly got me job offers from FAANG companies and book offers from publishers (some of the latter I accepted). It's also a good exercise to get better at your job because communicating effectively is just as important a skill for programmers as writing code is.
rs186
Are you comfortable with sharing the URL of your blog?
I find the idea interesting, but also puzzling -- If you work at a commercial company on proprietary software, like most of software engineers, there is very limited amount of things you can talk about work and not leak proprietary/internal information. Otherwise, you need to work enough outside work to have things you can talk about freely. I don't want to have a blog where it's all opinion and no concrete details, like my meaningless comments on HN. How do you manage to post "useful" things on a personal blog?
jamietanna
I'd recommend having a read of my blog (https://www.jvt.me/archives/), as I've been in a similar position, and heavily blogging my career
For instance between 2016-2021 where I was working in a large financial institution (Capital One), but still blogging about the work I was doing and problems I was solving, without leaking proprietary information
A lot of them didn't have the "context" for what problem was being solved or why, or I'd need to create a minimal example to help explain what needs to be fixed, which is also a very good skill to be more practiced in
You can also see how over the years of my career (https://hire.jvt.me/), some organisations have led to me blogging more openly about /what/ I'm doing
InsideOutSanta
You can discuss things unrelated to genuinely proprietary information. But this depends on the company—I worked for several companies whose secret sauce was more related to proprietary business information rather than proprietary tech, so they gave close to zero shits if I publicly wrote about it and, at times, republished my posts on their own company blog to make themselves more attractive to devs.
I also have a bunch of personal projects about which I can talk.
Topics like "what we learned load-balancing a tomcat cluster" contain genuinely useful information, but the company I worked for at the time didn't consider them proprietary because the proprietary stuff was what they ran on the cluster.
I'll acknowledge that this won't be the case for everybody. I've been pretty lucky that none of the companies I worked for prevented me from writing about these topics; some were happy to use what I wrote for their own promotional material.
(I don't want to dox myself, so I'd rather not share a link to my blog, and "what we learned load-balancing a tomcat cluster" isn't the literal title of a blog post I wrote.)
wonger_
I'm also curious about what kinds of posts were good enough to get job offers. In my experience it's hard to consistently produce thorough, accurate, and useful technical posts. It takes so much time.
If you have the time, though, open-source is a good way to work on non-proprietary, useful things.
scarface_74
Are you saying that anyone in your interview loop took time to read your blog posts? And it wasn’t just you passing the standard interview process like everyone else has to do.
samrus
I read it as them being approached by faang recruiters or hiring managers because they happened to stumble upon their blog and thought they might be a good fit. Although idk if that sort of thing happens anymore
InsideOutSanta
Someone at the company read my blog, asked me if I was interested in a job on their team, and initiated the hiring process if I said yes.
harvey9
I've had interviewers talk to me about my personal site, but it's on my resume so it's not like they had to search.
johnnyanmac
> Write about things you’ve worked on.
And I really can't. Thanks, games industry. So I need to make it a full time job doing signifigant side projects just to show off my skills for jobs.
Even then, this market right now isn't in "we'll call you" mode unless you're highly specialized.
tombert
I've recently started blogging again, mostly as a form of documentation for myself later at this point. I'm always working on some weird project, I'll get to some milestone, lose a bit of interest, think about it two months later only to realize I'd have to relearn everything and don't do it.
Having a blog allows me to compile my notes into a digestible and easy to read way, so if I revisit a project later I at least don't have to start from scratch.
fliellerjulian
Totally agree — writing about what you’ve built is a great way to both learn and stand out. Blogs, demos, and personal sites are powerful signals, especially in tech.
Openspot actually leans into that same idea: instead of feeding the algorithm, you just show your work — whether that’s a blog post, demo, video, or a quick walkthrough. It’s all hosted on your profile, so you can focus on signal over noise.
itsoktocry
>Totally agree — writing about what you’ve built is a great way to both learn and stand out
Stand out? "Write about stuff" is literally generic advice nowadays. Most of the content is crap, because people are only writing because other people suggest it.
dabockster
Agreed, but there isn't a really solid blogging platform anymore that:
- Offers a dev "enough" control (some HTML/CSS/JS support but not total control)
- Stays largely out of the way (maybe something like a "powered by" header/footer only)
- Doesn't try to lock free posts behind paywalls
- Is independently owned and not a big tech product (so no Blogger)
- Is abstracted enough so that someone doesn't need to know domain, DNS, hosting, VPS, or sysadmin stuff in general to start a website
The closest things I've seen to this are Neocities and Glitch. The best one used to be Blogger, but again it's big tech so you can't use it without being assimilated into the Google collective consciousness.
lategloriousgnu
Bear Blog meets every one of your requirements.
You can see examples on the discover page.
It has a small collection of simple pre-built themes, while also supporting custom CSS.
z3t4
Just write your own blog software. It's surprising how much you can do with just a <textarea> save it in a database. Then print out the content on a web site.
janalsncm
The barrier should not be the platform. If you have something interesting to say, there are many ways in 2025 to deliver text to people’s eyeballs.
You can use GitHub pages with Hugo which is what I do. You can build out a series of GitHub gists that link to each other. You can host a static S3 website with raw HTML. You can post redundantly to Twitter/Bluesky/your own subreddit/Medium/Google drive.
It doesn’t matter if there’s no single solution to every possible problem. The point is to write something interesting so 1) you understand it better 2) you can reference it later if you forget some details 3) you can show off to potential employers.
Whether or not it’s owned by big tech is a non-goal as far as getting a job is concerned.
johnnyanmac
At that point you just whip up a github pages domain and use your favorite frontend framework with some blogging framework taken into account. If Microsoft is still a deterrent, you just register your own domain and pay the dozen bucks per year to keep it spinning.
if you really can't be bothered to set any of that up, I suppose you can always find one of the non-mainstream open-source microblogging platforms. I'm sure there are some lovely "reddit alternatives" out there that feel great to blog on but has an audience of a dozen people internally.
jorams
There's a ton of those platforms, varying from extremely unknown to fairly well established. I'm pretty sure multiple of them end up as a Show HN every year. The only thing on your list they generally don't do is domain registration, but keeping that separate is generally a good thing. Sibling mentioned bearblog.dev, I'll mention write.as[1].
[1]: https://write.as/
scarface_74
Micro.blog covers all of your requirement.
deanebarker
I've written 20K or so words about this idea (meta-idea?). Some of those words might be intelligent... https://ineffable.deanebarker.net/
joshdavham
You can actually turn off LinkedIn’s recommendations here: https://lnkd.in/gQHsR8ps
Change it to “Most recent posts” and you’ll stop getting random influencers in your feed telling you that vibe coding is the future.
Nezteb
Non-shortened URL for anyone suspicious: https://www.linkedin.com/mypreferences/d/settings/preferred-...
walthamstow
Even better, if you follow no-one, your feed will be completely empty.
vector_spaces
My quick feedback / first impressions
One benefit of an algorithmic feed is that it works as as social proof in showing me that other people are actually using the site. Since your site doesn't have a feed apparently by design, you'll need some way of showing me (quickly!) that this is a living, breathing website that people actually use, otherwise it feels like I'm shouting into the void.
Another benefit of a feed is that I can immediately see how my activities and updates will look to other people. But it's not clear during onboarding how things will look to others, let alone who can see my profile and activity. Can any other user view my profile, or is it just a select cohort of hiring managers? Can I even interact with other users on this site who aren't hiring managers?
Next, after I import my resume and setup my profile, I am asked (I think) to write some sort of an article or essay with AI assistance. This step wasn't very clear, but even if it were, this is a huge ask for someone who just started using your site. The first ask should be something much less ambitious, and probably would benefit from gamification to make it feel less like homework
Finally, I clicked on the explore button to try to find folks to connect with. I gave a detailed description of the personas I'm interested in to the bot, and ended up getting a "No matching Candidates found" message. I think you should at least show me something, especially when I can't seem to do a regular search / browse manually -- or suggest better queries
Anyway, I know it's an MVP, and I see answers to some of my questions on your about page, but just offering this as food for thought. The overall onboarding was smooth and I appreciate the resume import experience, and I think you have a strong visual identity. Curious to see where you end up taking this
smeej
The reason I hate LinkedIn is because I haven't had one straightforward career path. I rewrite my resume to tailor it to whatever I'm applying to next, which generally means removing all the descriptions of each of my old jobs and updating them with the tailored version every time I apply somewhere.
I don't really think there's a way to fix that, because I don't think there are enough of us (or enough people looking to hire us) to build a substantial userbase.
I just want to highlight it as one of the reasons some people hate LinkedIn, which has nothing to do with spammy feeds or influencers.
eastoeast
Having both a hardware and software background and applying to both fields, I have the same problem. The UI needs a lot of help (sidebar needs to go), but I've been building this https://thebestresumewebsite.com/ to combat this issue. Basically, you can write a bunch of bullet points, then checkbox which ones you want for different variations, so you don't have to keep deleting bullet points!
adabyron
Best of luck. I've been wanting to build this for 2 years but don't have the time or passion available to do it justice.
My goals overlap a lot.
If you haven't seen https://huntr.co I think they do a great job helping you manage job hunting.
I think the social feed is LinkedIn's weakness as well. It creates a bad incentive for the company. I would use it a lot more if the feed was useful instead of fake engagement bait. Same with LinkedIn Learning being more about basic entry level courses than quality expert content.
My suggestion is to help people build valuable networks that discuss actual hard topics. I've seen a few companies try to create small exclusive groups that cost money to join but they try to guarantee meaningful, intelligent discussions & sharing. LinkedIn once tried to limit your network, which I still think was the right way to run it.
A popular marketing technique is to be the "Anti" company. I hope you can pull off the Anti-LinkedIn. The copywriting for that should write itself.
One more aside on recruiting. LinkedIn's infamous for terrible recruiters trying to fill quotas it seems. I don't know if recruiters need limits on messaging people or some type of ranking system.
fliellerjulian
Wow — thank you for this. You totally get the pain we’re trying to solve, and I really appreciate the encouragement
Funny enough, “The Anti-LinkedIn” has come up more than once during this launch - and I agree, the copy kind of writes itself when people feel the same pain.
Also +1 on Huntr — great tool! We’re focused more on visibility and standing out before the apply button, but I think they complement each other well.
You nailed something really important: the real opportunity is to create networks with actual signal — thoughtful discussions, deep expertise, and real connection. Not the dopamine feed. We’re starting super lightweight, but that’s absolutely part of the long-term vision.
And yeah… LinkedIn Learning + random recruiter spam + engagement farming = what pushed us to build this in the first place. Thanks again for taking the time — would love to stay in touch as we build.
8mobile
LinkedIn has definitely gotten worse but your solution seems too social to me, a more sober version of LinkedIn would be enough Thanks
mnky9800n
Tbh all LinkedIn could do is get rid of the feed and I would be happy.
davedx
I also find LinkedIn spammy and I’m fed up of videos everywhere, so for me the answer is definitely not more videos, sorry.
fliellerjulian
Totally get that — video fatigue is real, especially when it’s everywhere and often meaningless.
We’re not pushing video as a requirement — it’s just one option for people who want to show more personality or communicate things that don’t come across in text. Some folks prefer writing, some showcase projects or code — all of that works on OpenSpot.
The idea is to give people more ways to be seen for who they are, not force everyone into the same format.
venusenvy47
Just a casual comment: I kept thinking the URL said "Honeypot", so I was a little worried I was clinking a dangerous link.
teleforce
I thought it is just me of being paranoid, but I think it'll be much better to change the domain name for more commercial and professional one.
But again I also think that LinkedIn is a childish name, and is not commercial and professional as well.
scosman
I tried this years ago. Some advice: target your marketing and product at “beautiful+easy portfolio” to start. See if you can make something beautiful people want to share, and when other people see one they want to create their own.
You can’t compete against LinkedIn on network for now, and many years to come. So need to talk about the now value. But try to build in network effects (tag who you worked with) as soon as you manage to crack growth.
Or ignore me. My version didn’t work!
fliellerjulian
This is really good advice — thank you for sharing it, especially with the honesty about your own attempt.
Totally agree: we're not trying to compete with LinkedIn's network (yet). Our focus right now is exactly what you said — making it beautiful and dead simple to create a portfolio that feels personal, professional, and worth sharing. Something that makes people say: “I want one of those.”
We’ve got network effects on the roadmap too — things like tagging collaborators, showcasing teams, and making intros more fluid — but only once we’ve nailed the individual value first.
Appreciate you taking the time
LinkedIn feels more like Facebook every day — noisy feeds, fake engagement, and everyone shouting into the void.
Thats why I used to built a personal microsite on Squarespace and uploaded a video resume to YouTube to stand out - it helped me land interviews and get into Big Tech.
But I always wondered: why isn’t there a platform designed to help you stand out like that?
So I built OpenSpot: a public, curated platform where you can showcase who you are — with video, audio, and proof of your work. No endless feeds. No humblebrags. Just real people open to new opportunities.
We’ve already onboarded a few companies, so recruiters can reach out to you directly. But you can also connect with other standout folks and supercharge your network.
Just upload your resume and we´ll automatically generate your profile in under 1 minute.
It’s early, but feels like something people actually need. Would love your thoughts.