What can be done to fix Product Hunt?

I have used Product Hunt for years and recently started helping friends launch on there.

There are plenty of posts on here, and other forums that are making visible some of the issues Product Hunt has, particularly around being an echo-chamber, filled with spam / fake accounts and needing a significant amount of marketing for most launches to be considered "successful".

My question is, how can this be fixed?

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Require a one-off, $5 payment for user account.

This is an interesting approach, I think exclusivity was previously a bit of a strong point they had.

Add a forum and some elitism, and it becomes a cross between Indie Hackers and Something Awful.

split categories per the size of the company launching? At the moment there are some massive companies launching products and tis making it impossible to compete as a startup

This is a great response. They could take a category approach similar to funding stages, ie: idea, pre-seed, seed, series A, series B+

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