My experience as well. Plus the UI itself is a nightmare to navigate. Even something that should be a no-brainer like the embedded messaging is confusing to use. And they keep adding "features" to it!
I can do 10 applications in 10 seconds for various tiers of jobs and various jobs in different locations and get an idea of what kind of interviews I can get going forward.
But yeah, I don’t get more interviews. I just get to lazily spam.
The good ones I consider worth my time and are basically the only value I see from interacting with LI. Seeing people's resume is a nice side benefit, but something like VisualCV or similar offer a better format.
As a social network? Nah, I'm old school -- the dark closets/water coolers of the interwebs shouldn't be in the same place as primary branding.
Having been a hiring manager in that space, I'm not convinced the format mattered more than avoiding the obvious overly inscrutable wall of text, grammar check failures, or irrelevant data points.
We work with recruiters and hiring managers to review the designs. The primary things we review are readability/scanability and visual appeal.
We found that a lot of our customers were having more issues with getting offers than getting interviews, so we have chose to focus more on appealing to hiring managers.
In terms of the actual social network... people use that sh? I've had my moments of Facebook addiction in the distant past, but there's nothing about LinkedIn that makes me look forward to logging in. My feed is mostly composed of inspirational quotes, people celebrating their anniversary at their current job, corporate brown-nosing, articles on productivity, articles about people quitting their job, etc. All generic, mostly low-effort junk. Let's not even get started on the recruiter spam!
Unfortunately, it we will have to wait for a serious decline of LinkedIn before a serious competitor can make headway.