Product Hunt's Response to Accusations of Exclusivity Is to Increase Exclusivity | Hacker News Reader

Product Hunt's Response to Accusations of Exclusivity Is to Increase Exclusivity

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83 pointsminimaxir34 comments

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My main issue with Product Hunt is that most of the products are so trivial that it almost seems like a parody site.

A sample from right now:

'The funniest dog name generator ever'

'Fast and easy way of collecting email addresses'

'Finally, an emoji keyboard for the modern desktop'

Don't people have more interesting things to do with their time, or try to create more interesting, useful products?

Yeah, it cracks me up nearly every time. I mean, there's definitely a place for little projects like this where a couple people say "man there's gotta be a better way to collect email addresses and put them in a shared doc" and put something together. It's like a novelist writing a little two-page short story - just someone executing an idea.

But there are so many, and they're often so overwrought! I guess it's really easy to make a professional-looking landing page for stuff now, but that doesn't excuse the vapid self-hype the items give to themselves: "Hat management will never be the same again." "Prepare to start a new life with this revolutionary alarm app." "You've never experienced productivity unless you've tried these Slack automation scripts." (fake but still representative)

So yeah. I've thought about doing a column mocking these things but it would probably just leave me more jaded.

Product Hunt's greatest success is being the perfect reflection of the Silicon Valley industry and mindset that surrounds it. Whether you consider this a feature or a bug is a personal judgement.

Personally I'm glad it exists because it seems to divert at least some of the vacuous SV sycophancy away from Hacker News.

Your first paragraph deserves to live in a poster.

And everyone responds with: (these are usually the top comments btw)

"great product! awesome team! :)"

"Love these guys and the future of work looking so beautiful"

"This is awesome"

"this is awesome"

"Probably one of my favourite teams lately."

"this is wonderful. Thank you for this. Can't wait to start contributing, if that ever becomes a possibility."

What I'm amazed at is that very few people actually comment on the value/benefits of the product and focus more on the (1) team building it (2) the design/beauty of the landing page (3) a virtual high five. It seems a little...backwards...no?

If vote brigading is the main way for products to make front page (per the original article), then this type of behavior follows logically. Chances are 90% of those commenters did not actually try the product itself.

To me, the weirdest thing about Product Hunt is the lackluster name. The word "product" mostly makes me think of SKUs and novelty plastic junk.

Who really wants to be a "product hunter"? The excitement factor in that would seem to fall somewhere between "discount shopper" and "logistics manager"...

I actually like their name when paired with the cat, which is a "hunter".

Small projects have a higher likelihood of being on the front page since they're quicker to build. You see more of them.

There are many large, non-trivial products that rise up and have way more votes than the trivial ones - it just happens less often. Check out some of the collections of most upvoted products over time ranges, for example: https://www.producthunt.com/e/most-upvoted-in-tech

>Submitters without any network at all are screwed.

If success in becoming featured on Product Hunt is contingent on the submitter's network, then the submitter's product is probably of such quality that they're screwed anyways.

That, or their product is solid but it simply isn't appealing to the PH crowd. You see cool stuff every day that fits that description, usually accumulating a mere handful of votes. Generally speaking, the more niche the product is, the more likely it is to end up in that category.

Product Hunt is ruthless curation. It isn't designed to be fair. Suffice it to say, exceptional products—or products that make waves elsewhere—are almost assuredly bound to do well on Product Hunt, regardless if the author even has an account there, let alone a network.

To be clear, I'm not defending insider voting rings, I'm just saying the best strategy is to trancend them entirely.

The difference is where the product shows up on the PH page.

With a network, you automatically get access to the front page. Without it, you won't even show up on the site even if it's the best product in the world for the PH crowd.

It'd still be posted on Product Hunt though, despite no self-submission.

That said, banking on PH to carry your initial launch is a bad idea if you've no network there, let alone posting ability.

This is exactly what happened to Digg. You had people getting paid to get stuff up on Digg's front page. So Digg introduced friends and the ability to see what friends are digging. And they banded together to really ruin the experience for others.

During the time it happened, I did a bit of offhand calculation and found that of all the posts on Digg's front page, most had the same 100 or so "power diggers" in the first 200 likes of the submission. And these 100 users were authors of at least half the submissions on the front page, many of which were clear promotional ads.

So people are more worried on being featured on PH than having a profitable business? Am I the only one who couldn't care less about PH?

Way too many idiots playing entrepreneur. My customers aren't on PH. Most, if any "customers" on PH are short lived.

I honestly don't get it. Maybe is my fault, I don't know, maybe I'm missing something.

You're not missing anything. Product Hunt will fade away as the VC bubble continues to deflate.

This. Don't get attached to PH, when the bubble is a poppin' PH will be gone.

It doesn't, and I'm not saying that it is.

However, the perception of some naive entrepreneurs is that being on Product Hunt is a one-way ticket to success, which is why there are tons of blog posts on Reddit and Medium about success stories: https://www.reddit.com/r/startups/search?q=Product+hunt&rest...

Another trend in those stories is "I had a strong network upvote my product!" which entrepreneurs think is a good thing (the hustle!) and obviously does not matter in the real world.

I think PH is a negative externality on the startup ecosystem.

No and no.

But you have to remember, PH is another source of exposure for people's startups. They are a funded, YC company. Products on the homepage get a viral lift (via Twitter, votes, comments, etc.).

Also, it is well known that VCs and angel investors frequent PH and IIRC some have even admitted to sourcing deals on there. For someone who dreams of getting funded and moving to SV/SF, that's a very big deal.

https://pando.com/2014/05/30/sv-angel-closes-seed-deal-sourc...

It's sad. The response PH gave in December dodged the true question of how do things get to the homepage [1]. Defenders stuck to the concept of "Great products will make it to the homepage"–in reality, everyone knows that's complete BS.

I find myself going to PH weekly now instead of daily. It's almost predictable the things you'll see there now (yet another mockup tool, "ProductHunt for X", trivial toy app, etc.).

Maybe a site like this simply can't scale and keep this format.

[1] https://twitter.com/rrhoover/status/679150836862218241

Product Hunt is the mirror image of Silicon Valley startup VC scene. It's all about connections, nepotism, pedigree, ass-kissing and brown-nosing.

Product Hunt's problem is that even though a less exclusive/biased system would create more value for users, such a system wouldn't allow PH to capture much, if any, of that value for themselves. By enabling biases in their listings, they're able to shift some of that value from the users over to themselves. It's good for the companies that get more attention than they deserve, and most consumers won't find out due to information asymmetry and apathy.

It's the same reason why you can't trust Yelp reviews - they needed to generate revenue somehow, and the only real option was to offer to hide negative reviews in return for money.

the only real option was to offer to hide negative reviews in return for money.

I don't understand this. Why couldn't they sell "you seem to be looking for a dentist... this other dentist (who paid for this advert) has a higher rating than the one you're looking at right now"? It seems that Yelp could have been in the enviable position of selling advertising which is actually useful to the viewer.

Because then why would any dentist who is not at the top pay for advertising?

Because they would gain customers who were previously looking at inferior-to-them (according to Yelp ratings) dentists.

You would think so, but in reality they sell banners on a CPM basis on blanket categories.

How they screwed up this opportunity, I don't know.

"It's the same reason why you can't trust Yelp reviews - they needed to generate revenue somehow, and the only real option was to offer to hide negative reviews in return for money."

This isn't true. You are repeating unsubstantiated rumors as if they are fact.

Source: I worked there. I know the code and processes in question. It isn't true.

It's too bad OpenHunt didn't take off. But of course why would it? With no public commenting system it simply isn't "sticky" enough.

https://www.openhunt.co/

HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10759879

Yeh but it also takes a substantial, sustained effort to build a community and after the initial launch the OpenHunt crew stopped.

https://www.openhunt.co/audit

Maybe no spam for all of Feb?

> The front page real estate taken by the in-network posts comes at the expense of those out-of-network in a zero-sum game. Submitters without any network at all are screwed.

I don't know if that assessment is true. I don't have a network. If I submit something to PH and someone with a network upvotes it, their network is now more likely to see it. So if you create something cool, that a few people with networks discover on the upcoming feed, you're chances to reach even more people and get the foot in the door (and land on the frontpage) are higher now, with this new front page algorithm, no?

Granted, if you don't have a network, your submission is stuck in the "upcoming" purgatory, so that issue already blocks the probability of a serendipitous upvote.

Now you can't submit something unless you're invited to the network and PH approves. Anybody want to help me out with an invitation?

Thanks for the analysis. I'd be curious to see PH's traffic. I get the vibe from checking # of retweets/hearts on their tweets that PH has peaked and are now on the descent.

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