Openhunt – forgotten already? | Hacker News Reader

Openhunt – forgotten already?

5 pointskulesh5 comments

Not long time ago I was moved by the post revealing flaws in ProductHunt mechanisms. In a way, I felt cheated and really enjoyed the idea of a fair, truly open, upvoting-based service that would tell about the new and exciting products. Someone suggested that openhunt.co can become such platform. As an experiment, I stopped using PH and visited OpenHunt.co on a daily basis. I am sure I was not alone. At first, there were lots of posts with some really good products upvoted. However it quickly died out. Here is the full list of products posted a couple of days ago.

MONDAY January 18

▲ 4 - Webfolio - Showcase and share code snippets!

▲ 2 - Double air hockey table - Invention

▲ 2 - TwitSpot - Spam filter for Twitter direct messages

▲ 1 - Simple Image Optimizer - Compress and optimize your image files to speed up your website loading times.

▲ 1 - TODOED - Turn any text into a delegated todo.

The question is – where is everybody? Got back to ProductHunt I suppose? Shouldn't we regroup and try harder in supporting free and open, HN-like systems such as OpenHunt?

P.S.: I have no relations with OpenHunt.

This doesn't surprise me. Product Hunt is largely successful because of its community. That didn't happen by accident, Ryan Hoover, the face of PH, puts a lot of effort into curating the community.

OpenHunt on the other hand was just a technical solution to a problem that was mildly annoying for some PH users. And guess what, PH just opened its gates. I got an "invite" this week to become an active contributor, without even asking for one. Thank OH for this, I'm sure they forced PH to make the decision much quicker.

OpenHunt tried solving a problem for the content makers without providing any additional benefit to the content consumers.

It's a nice, heart-warming mission. But in the end of the day, content is king, that's what consumers want.

There have been many examples of people rallying around a "free and open" version of a service. They fail to realize that the end consumer barely cares. Look at voat (Reddit), app.net (Twitter), Diaspora (Facebook), even ycreject.com (Y Combinator) tried to be a thing for a while.

If someone is able to make it "free and open" while also making it a better experience than the alternative, then it'll be a big success. But so far everyone gets that wrong.

It is especially sad because often these attempts fail to consider the elements of the original that caused it to "suck" so bad in the first place.

so even when they do survive, they're seldom any better than what they've replaced, because no one's bothered to actually reflect on how the project affected the social atmosphere of the place.

My guess is that heavy ProductHunt users were unwilling to move. The OpenHunt users were probably people like me: ProductHunt is interesting, but it's not quite interesting or useful enough for me to actually use it.

For me, it was almost like a New Years resolution: start using OpenHunt! But I didn't, because I mostly don't really care. I logged in once and then never came back.

(Also, the name was a bad idea. OpenReddit would never beat Reddit, you know? It might as well be called "the same, but newer and worse".)

If OpenHunt wants to take off, it has to be more visual like ProductHunt. Every time I go to OpenHunt I spend no more than a few seconds, because it just looks like a list of non-curated links - so why bother?

If I could have small intros or images for each link, anything that could compel me to click, that'll be much better. Just check how Facebook and Twitter ads work, they always include images, even to send you to a SaaS site.

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