That was posted over a year ago; since then, things have gotten even worse with regards to elitism and the fairness of the system (nowadays the name of the game is figuring out how to market your Product Hunt submission to your network of friends without explicitly asking for upvotes, unless you're famous/VC in which case you're allowed to be blatant). My original rant on the topic after the acquisition: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13080432

I've recently given up calling out the voting manipulation on Product Hunt because everyone calls me a buzzkill for doing so.

1. It was invitation-only when I tried to join it. No real complain here, it just didn't make sense for this kind of page and I don't like it.

2. Then a couple of projects of mine got to the front-page of HN and someone -- I am guessing an admin -- added them to Product Hunt with an email I never gave them which resulted in waves of SPAM.

I cannot stress the 2nd point enough. Imagine that you make a project, a random person re-publishes it in some network you were denied entering and now for every person who comments in there you get a low-quality email.

Edit: for clarity I hope

I mean, not complaining or anything but I did not expect a beta signup page to get hunted. Didn't find out until three weeks later when I tried to submit the product.

eg. one of these badges https://thenextweb.com/media/2015/02/02/want-get-product-hun...