Go rockclimbing and meet cto’s there.

> What are better alternatives to LinkedIn, for people who want to get that rare serendipitous message from a recruiter?

The only one I know of is to have a personal social network of people who know you and are directly familiar with your work. Every rare serendipitous message from a recruiter I've received resulted from a referral from someone I directly knew.

But rare is probably the correct qualifier. I have 25 years experience, I've received four, followed up on two and only one resulted in me changing jobs. None came before I had 10 years of experience. YMMV

Hacker News monthly threads for “Who wants to be hired” and “Who is hiring”. That’s how I got hired for my current job (2019) and that’s how I’m hiring currently.

All I got from that was some spam and "defi" recruiting for whatever Ponzi scheme the cryptocoin community is hot on right now.

I got my current job from it.

No idea which experience is more typical.

Yeah I'm still getting spam from sketchy crypto orgs months after I put my email into a HN hiring thread once. Don't recommend.

Consider a "burner" email alias for such situations. Fastmail makes creating them easy enough.

Apple’s iCloud+ also includes “hide my email” which creates randomized addresses that forward to your main account.

Most industries have some kind of private discussion forums, which could be sponsored by a professional organization or related media company or just some guy. Those used to be email lists and web discussion forums but now some have moved to Slack or Discord. Find those forums for industries where you're interested in working and start actively participating.

+1! think your local tech scene (my city has a general dev slack), language or framework specific chats for web or mobile dev, hackathons/conferences, etc.

Would personally stay away from anyone offering to be part of a “community” for a fee

Is there an alternative we can practically move to that will turn LinkedIn into an abandoned property like MySpace?

(Ideal would be a distributed approach with semantic Web and such. But I'd settle for a centralized site that wanted to be a lot better, and was capable of that.)