Ask HN: Why isn't there competition to LinkedIn yet?
49 comments
·December 22, 2025codingdave
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.
swyx
this is spoken from a permaemployee perspective. linkedin very much changes when you 1) become a hiring manager, 2) become a founder
pavel_lishin
Can you say how it changes?
nirushiv
Can you elaborate please? Very curious to hear non-employee perspective
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
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
null
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.
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.
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.