I have something to confess. I like LinkedIn.
I’ve trained that algorithm to deliver the things that make me say, “right on!” My feed, which I also feel fine ignoring for periods of time without any sense that my absence will be noticed, is full of people whose faces I like to see.
But I also hate LinkedIn.
Of course, there’s the fundamental problem of a centralized, traditionally-run tech company owning me as much as LinkedIn does. Of my contribution to it profiting someone, of my social relationships being owned. I can “export” a list of people I am connected to, my “data”, but I can’t easily connect LinkedIn to anything that would improve the connections – or so-called connections- I have developed.
Those corporate web 2.0 issues aside, LinkedIn is also kind of the opposite of useful for the very thing I am there for. Every time I am at an event with interesting people, or meet a new person, I “link” with them, only to have zero context about the whole thing immediately. There they are in the collection, but there’s basically no impetus to go further than that, or to be able to use LinkedIn to do the kind of basic follow-up and relationship development that would obviously be necessary for someone to go beyond being a profile to being a colleague. I hate having messages locked away in a UI that leads me to forget I ever spoke to someone. And don’t get me started on the giant misses in other parts of the product- why are LinkedIn Groups so completely terrible?
Yes, there have been attempts to disrupt LinkedIn before, but most of them are just the same ‘own everyone’s data’ kind of approaches. We are perhaps starting to have enough DeCent tech to do something more exciting? So if that’s what you are building, here are some wish list items:
- You have a public profile but you can limit information you share to classes of people (co-workers, communities, friends) or even to certain people. Over time you can shift the level of sharing based on relationships that develop.
- You have a social graph and when someone looks at your profile while logged into theirs, they can see your mutual connections
- When someone connects with you, you have the opportunity (or even requirement? You choose.) to add context about how you know them. You can add more context as time goes on. Their profile reflects messages you’ve shared as well. This shared context is visible to both people but no one else. Could this be contained in some E2E way? Why not?
- There’s an RSS feed associated with you that you can feed your various channels of public streams through, ala ActivityPub, and there’s a way for your contacts to see this as a feed with other people’s content. There’s a transparent algorithm you can adjust to favour certain people or relevant-to-you content or other preferences
- You can use the platform as a mailing list. Contacts can opt-in and then you can message groups of people filtered by interests, locations, etc.
- It’s easy to pass along other people’s content as well, so there are still metaphors for responding to and amplifying content (though it could be as a comment that is attached to the content or as a message only delivered to the person posting). There are ways to take content into a better UI for conversations, ideally. I’m imagining here that we’re really talking about something independent of this particular platform, no need to re-invent every wheel.
- There is probably benefit in orienting around profiles as a resume as well as simply a way to connect. LinkedIn has managed to stay less toxic by both avoiding being ad-driven and by being a space that represents you to the working world. But you could make many improvements to the way information is presented- making the resume part more modular so you could choose to emphasize non-job-work more prominently, and to more easily share your non-job aspects with people you get to know more deeply. The trick is to have that information be yours and not the platform’s. Now we get into identity management, but you know, people are figuring it out, or trying to- eep.
If you’re making this, I am excited. As everyone always says to me, “I want to be a beta tester.” I am guessing something like it already is happening. And then perhaps LinkedIn will finally be… left out.