The reasons LinkedIn feels so cringe are 2-fold:
1. Their attempt to shoehorn so much of the site's social interactions into structured data is the antithesis of being social. Feels sterile, forced, I hate this word but "inauthentic" feels right. It's just not a natural state.

2. A soc network where initial interactions are essentially cold emails is junk. More work. I have >400 'connections' in my inbox and ~25% have an intro. Half of these intros are asking for something or pitching. None of these people have 'earned permission' to ask for anything.

Twitter is just a better product for all this. Having what we used to describe as "the big white box problem" (what will people put here!?) is good, actually. It means you have to think a bit. Whereas LinkedIn and Facebook cattle-prod you through the experience quite a bit more.

LinkedIn truly is just white collar monster dot com at this point. Want to make a lateral career move? Need more lead gen ideas or C-list consultants who can't organically drum up enough demand? Want smarmy stories of waking up at 5am and "crushing it." No thanks. Business NPCs.

I want to think someone could build a better LinkedIn, but do we really need it? Your portfolio website or blog or industry column or YouTube channel or Tweets or search results/totality of your reputation *is* the modern resume more than a mousetrap for recruiter and sales spam.