Eighteen open problems · 2 of 19

A professional network that bans automated outreach

Every professional inbox is filling with generated messages, and the cost of sending one has gone to zero while the cost of reading one has not. A vetted network where automated outreach is banned by rule, seeded from one campus and grown by referral, sells the one thing an open network can no longer offer, which is that a person chose to write to you. The Ivy-seeded dating products of ten years ago are the closest precedent for how it starts.

The open question. Can a members' network make "a human wrote this" the whole product?

What would kill it

A ban is unenforceable without detection, and detection is the arms race this exists to avoid. Enforcement has to run on consequence after the fact rather than on scanning, and nobody has shown that works at scale.

Tell me why this is wrong

That is more useful than telling me why it is interesting. Reply to [email protected] or on LinkedIn.