LinkedIn is a _great_ business development tool. Want to know the name of the person at company X who could use your product? LinkedIn is awesome for that.
But time and time again, the main thing one hears about LinkedIn is the (systemically encouraged) abuse of the system by spammy recruiters, not the ‘business networking’ it should be a haven for.
A significant move away from the traditional recruitment paradigm as a whole is the only thing that will make LinkedIn enjoyable to use. When traditional recruiters aren’t the best way to find talent, LinkedIn will be free to grow and prosper as a business networking community.
We’re trying to solve this problem at Mighty Spring (https://www.mightyspring.com). Whereas on LinkedIn your information is public and ripe for recruiter abuse, Mighty Spring profiles are only visible to the public in a cleansed, anonymous form. Behind the safe walls of our system, our users are free to indicate their career aspirations, explore new opportunities, and accept incoming interview requests (from first party companies only, not agency recruiters). Externally, the profiles are anonymous, so no one even knows you are a member of the community unless you choose to reveal your information specifically to them and accept an interview.
We’re in private beta now, but are already successfully connecting our users with great companies -- all at each user's discretion, of course! We’d love to help all of you solve your problems with LinkedIn, so we’ll live-monitor signups coming from Hacker News and expedite beta invites to all you guys. Definitely let us know if you have feedback or questions. My email is in my profile.