I doubt it. Network effects matter and nobody is switching from LinkedIn for fear of missing out. There is no other work-related social network like it.

It's different with FB/Instagram that there isn't much at stake so people will just switch to test something and then stay. With LinkedIn, the "what if I miss a job opportunity?" factor means there's pressure to ignore the UI issues and just stick it out.

I don't see a disruptor in this industry, do you know of any?

The folks in my field (ML/applied math/scientific computing) are all on there, and moreover those reaching out to me are always technical folks rather than recruiters.

(Twitter gets a bad rap, but the academic/dev parts of it are the single best way I've found to track the Zeitgeist of fields and topics I'm interested in.)

'tech twitter' is full of junior developers, developer advocates, and students, all trying to sell e-books to each other or virtue signal their way into a dev advocate role. I only found content creator and tech influencer sales pitches.

I think tech Twitter quality is heavily dependent on being thoughtful of who you follow.

Network effects is not an impenetrable fortress. It just means your product has to have a really good reason for people to switch, and I dont see anyone in the work network space doing anything really better than LI. I wish someone was.

I am relatively lucky, because I am now old enough to have friends, colleagues and some reputation so I do not need it ( amusingly, my profile was flagged for something recently and I have not looked back ), but I remember when I did and recruiters were the least painful way to get my foot in the doors

They probably just decided, we may as well do it too.

omg, I had that feeling too (and I actually removed my profile): good: I thought I was alone :)

(In my case the extra material is relevant... I've run pricing at five companies, which is usually a massively cross-functional job. Unlike my typical competitor, I've also mastered most of the supporting technical, accounting, and commercial disciplines... which makes me a one stop shop for serious pricing problems.)

I get hundreds per year.

Maybe 1 in 50 are decently relevant.

Many are mass spams. A good amount will be in tech I have no interest in, haven't worked in in over a decade, or have never worked in. It's clear the messages are sent without ever actually reading your profile or even job titles.

I wish there were a way to control only the handcrafted / non-spam messages reaching my inbox.

All the automated messages address me as if Dr was my actual first name, So “hi Dr” or “Dr,…”

So it’s a good filter for all the machine created messages, which is a very very high percentage of them.

There are seem to be some techniques for verifying existence of an email address without actually emailing it.

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/565504/how-to-check-if-a...

I tried the below services with a custom G Suite domain and, to my surprise, they successfully worked, even for addresses that I know have never been posted publicly (!).

https://email-checker.net/validate

https://clean.email/verifier/how-to-check-if-an-email-is-val...

For my intent it kinda works the exact way I want it to, but I really only ever login when I'm looking for a job.

Often network effects dominate this sort of thing, so that's probably not true.