We actually tried the "Reddit for products" model about a year before PH and failed. They did a much better job cultivating a community and their site looked much better, so I'm not surprised they had better success than us. We also allowed anyone to submit.

Anyway long story short, about 90% of what was submitted was objectively terrible, to the point that it made the entire site feel dumpy. Much more so than your standard terrible content because it had the added negative of trying to sell something. I don't know if PH started that way or not, but if we had continued it was clear that a high level of curation was needed.