I've thought about writing a new Linkedin for years too. It's the curse of the engineer: you use something that sucks and you want to make a better one.

But when thinking about a new Linkedin, I feel like making a new social network with less spam, less clickbait, and a better UI isn't enough to make people switch. What you really need to do is make a strong community centered around a particular industry with serious news, occasional gossip, and heavily moderated comments. In other words for our industry it exists: it's Hacker News.