Show HN: I built a zero-cost, ad-free alternative to LinkedIn

I don’t want a score associated with my name, so I wouldn’t use your service. I wonder how many people would like to have an associated “trust” score; I mean if you are an average individual I imagine you would get an average score of, let’s say, 5 over 10... you’ll look ridiculously untrustworthy compared to someone who has a score of 9/10. At least in the real world you have a chance to prove that you could be as trustworthy as anyone; with a score that chance goes away.

&gt;I built a zero-cost, ad-free alternative to LinkedIn<p>Zero-cost and ad-free <i>FOR NOW</i> you mean. At some point you&#x27;re going to have make money and the only viable options are 1) charity&#x2F;donations 2) subscription 3) ads and data selling. #2 means you&#x27;re not &#x27;zero-cost&#x27; and #3 means you&#x27;re not &#x27;ad-free&#x27;. So you&#x27;re going to rely on donations?

Turning personal trust in others into what looks like a stock market game strikes me as quite odd. I wouldn&#x27;t find people trading internet points back and forth to determine my &#x27;value&#x27; on a platform as something I would like. I like the trading of points even less considering the target of the website about people representing themselves in the scope of their professions.

I can&#x27;t help but attempt to apply Kant&#x27;s categorical imperative to this approach. Is this something I would wish as a universal rule?<p>What about folks who have really bad luck and participate in organizations that are a bad fit for their personality? Their score immediately goes down, and then the odds of them finding a better fit plummet. There is no &quot;fresh start,&quot; so to speak.<p>If everybody used this system to make a judgment about whether a person is worthy, it feels like we would immediately create a permanent caste system. There would be social outcasts that would only work with other outcasts, because, frankly who else would want to? They are, in a word, untouchable.<p>So, for me, it appears this system is unethical to the extreme.<p>Happy to be proved wrong, of course!

There are a lot of objections on here to being &quot;valued&quot; and &quot;commodified.&quot; I don&#x27;t understand why.<p>You are valued every time you go to an interview or ask for a raise. You can leverage your network in the same way as you can leverage &quot;investment.&quot;<p>To me this is already a more transparent version of what already happens.

Don&#x27;t do the score thing. Just. Don&#x27;t. Where there is money involved like this, despite whatever good intentions you may or may not have, reducing people to a score invites gaming and bad actors.

Black Mirror Nose Dive anyone? Nice concept but the &quot;invest&quot; idea introduces friction that could be too much to overcome. What about a PageRank system based on recommendation &#x2F; testimonials and likes and connections?

Free and ad-free sounds great, but will it be free of cheesy inspirational humble bragging? Then I&#x27;m in.

I wish there was a service I could simply pay for using, enough so that the operator wouldn&#x27;t have to use invasive advertising where I could connect with other people who would want my services or vice-versa. Why such a simple thing seems to be not possible? Everyone looks to be only motivated by $$$ and turning potential customers into product. I also don&#x27;t understand why should I value a network where the main selling point is zero-cost ad-free. If people on there don&#x27;t want to pay for something that brings them value, are they going to want to pay me for my services? This is so contradictory. What&#x27;s the goal here?

Cory Doctorow’s classic Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom as a service. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Down_and_Out_in_the_Magic_Kingdom" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Down_and_Out_in_the_Magic_Ki...</a>

Novel idea but won&#x27;t something like this just end up being manipulated or gamed in one way or another.

What&#x27;s the killer feature? How is it drastically different from LinkedIn or Angel.co?

On positive note, I really think we need alternative to LinkedIn, wish you all the best. Some of the things and criticism are spot on but it is welcome to have people thinking on how to improve this area.

very poor messaging here.<p>this is like 99designs or toptal or any marketplace for providers. not like linkedin. ad-free is a lie as the entire platform is advertising. (syndicated ad-free more like it.)<p>because the platform <i>depends</i> on the TRU score, this form the social network between providers, and customers I suppose. This in and of itself is a privacy violation. The major problem with linkedin (from privacy perspective) is the information <i>they</i> have on you, which they monetise. They <i>are</i> the privacy problem, not syndicated ads, and you are not fixing that.<p>outside of the bubble, no one cares about the privacy angle, not in a real way. (they complain, a lot, but have no problem continuing to use privacy invasive services.) your pronouncement of being privacy focused, while not actually being so, is pretty bad.<p>i think you <i>may</i> have something here, you just need to pivot your messaging.<p>FWIW I think the TRU score is a) not innovative, and b) should be abandoned in favor of familiar 5 star scale. (like amazon or ebay: #stars plus #ratings)<p>If you really want to be &quot;trustworthy&quot;, you will publish statistical data on ratings. Of course, everyone will have &gt;4 star rating, so you can&#x27;t do that. I don&#x27;t think that&#x27;s a hindrance to marketing &quot;trustworthiness&quot; though, even if it&#x27;s baloney.

&gt; zero-cost | privacy-focused | ad-free<p>Where does the money come from?

A centralized proprietary service is exactly what we need to replace the other thousands of services who all do the same thing but look evil due to some mysterious coincidence, totally unrelated to being centralized and proprietary.

A Linkedin alternative is really something that should be self hosted and federated.

The Zero-Cost is showing in the 8.3 second load time I get on the first page. Second, if you want to take up space in LinkedIns market, you need to copy the pros of that platform. Good luck.

Very interesting! I&#x27;ll be curious to see if the focus on privacy for something like this ends up being a differentiator. Lots of folks care about privacy, though sometimes it becomes a challenge due to some of the limitations you end up with as a result. The trade-off people are making is obvious to some, but not to others.<p>Congrats! Launching a product is super hard, this is an impressive accomplishment. I&#x27;d imagine you would put this site on your profiles. :D

How do you plan to compete against LinkedIn &amp; monetise?

I believe you&#x27;re on the right path. Exploring and displaying trust between people is one of the big missing pieces on the web.<p>People are currently replacing the harder questions like &quot;can I trust this person to do what he says he can&quot; with simple or shallow ones based on status and image.<p>Good luck with this!

Make sure you think about how to address the &quot;Chicken-egg problems&quot; for network-effect.<p>A good read about it is: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;apenwarr.ca&#x2F;log&#x2F;20201227" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;apenwarr.ca&#x2F;log&#x2F;20201227</a> (if you&#x27;re short on time, you can skip to &quot;Chicken-egg problems&quot; section)<p>&quot;The defining characteristic of a chicken-egg technology or product is that it&#x27;s not useful to you unless other people use it. Since adopting new technology isn&#x27;t free (in dollars, or time, or both), people aren&#x27;t likely to adopt it unless they can see some value, but until they do, the value isn&#x27;t there, so they don&#x27;t.&quot;

Congrats! Will make some time to sign-up.<p>I like the vector. Looking forward to the progress. I think your solution space will give you other opportunities down the road even if sellff struggles.

What&#x27;s the tech stack you&#x27;ve used? Do you think it&#x27;s better to build an App first or a Website? or both?

Looks like Empirecred and Klout merged?

The whole stock shares &#x2F; TRU score thing is quite cool, I think this has potential.

my detailed analysis (searching for dave and counting them... 5.. and then multiplying by 50...2% of men are called Dave) tells me there are ~250 people on your service. I will join when you have 2.5 Million :)

Can&#x27;t sign up. Broken. No error, just spins and quits spinning.

I signed up but never got a confirmation email, and login wont work.

Has problems in authentication, ad-free, quite interesting.

This site is excellent, and I have made my account!

Tried to join, one second spinner, nothing.

&gt; The SELLFF TRU Score is a number that represents quality, trust, character and performance.<p>No. Stop. Just stop. Holy crap No, No, No, No, No.

Has everyone forgotten Klout?

So another &quot;my data was sold after 3 years of &#x27;privacy&#x27; website&quot;<p>Thanks, but no thanks

How are you preventing the system being gamed? How would, for example, prevent QAnon, or its equivalent, from being the dominant source and judgement of reputation?<p>Who pays for it, if not me?

it doesn&#x27;t show anything with javascript disabled...

I browse with ublock origin, and get an endless spinning circle in the tab.

Not directly related to the post, but developers should be aware that developer salaries will likely jump significantly this year.<p>The VC market is super hot right now - VC firms are being flooded with cash, and they need to deploy it. Companies are raising massive amounts of money at unprecedented valuations. A large chunk of that money is going to hire developers. The recruiting industry is seeing a huge surge in hiring in the past couple of months (source: I run a technical recruiting company (1)).<p>Because demand and cash available to hire developers has increased significantly in the past few months, but the supply is basically fixed, companies are offering higher salaries to attract talent. They have the cash for it.<p>Keep in mind that new money raised from investors will raise the value of your stock options, but rarely translates to salary increases for existing employees.<p>What a time to be a software engineer.<p>(1) <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.facet.net" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.facet.net</a>

signup doesn&#x27;t work for me in firefox. it just refreshes the page.

Interesting take on the challenge of determining professional trust. Seeing pictures of 3 white&#x2F;European males on the homepage might turn off a more diverse audience of users, however - even if it&#x27;s representative of the early adopters, it&#x27;s important to present the product more inclusively.