Contrary opinion, I hate LinkedIn's site and even though I'm connected to some colleagues and industry people on there I avoid using it as much as possible.

Some of this dates back to their repeatedly inventing new excuses to email me that I had to go and unsubscribe from, part is that I can't look at anyone's page without LinkedIn telling them about it, part is their finagling everyone signing up to give access to their Gmail contacts similar to Facebook's harvesting of user info.

I guess they're a competitor, but if they're not as bad as Facebook is it's only because they have less reach.

LinkedIn is not a competitor to Facebook. Why? Context. When you go on facebook you’re in a social state of mind. When you go on LinkedIn you’re in a formal / business state of mind. It’s a glorified resume and socially conservative af. That fact alone means that, even if LinkedIn has the same exact user base as facebook, we are not going to use LinkedIn like we do facebook.

Facebook profits off of our attention and engagement. Facebook’s real competition is who or whatever holds our attention. Whoever manages to make us give facebook less of our time. LinkedIn does not really have our attention like facebook does. We set up a profile and leave and maybe get on it when job hunting or when someone writes us a recommendation. There is no “LinkedIn addiction.” But you wanna know what website has been getting even more and more of our attention? Netflix lol. Netflix can take hours out of our day and during those hours we may be so absorbed in the show that we’re not really engaging with facebook. So yeah, Netflix is a bigger competitor to facebook than LinkedIn.

So, HN then? (I'm only half-kidding. I have an unhealthy addiction to HN)

I deleted my facebook and use HN more. So technically yes, at least for me. I wonder how many other people who frequent HN have either done away completely with facebook or give it less attention than a control group

When social media platforms are optimizing for user engagement, it's not surprising that you're seeing the same features. With enough A/B testing they all discover the same thing and end up on the same path. The FB feed has become a bunch of memes/videos, increasing engagement. It won't be surprising once the LinkedIn feed becomes saturated with videos as well. I don't see LinkedIn as a strict competitor to FB. They're both social platforms but different.