Product Hunt is dead | Hacker News Reader

Product Hunt is dead

sedimental.org

325 pointsmhashemi115 comments

Let me communicate this clearly for the subtype of HN users who are engaged in some startup thing: You won't find actual users for your product on Product Hunt because neither normal people nor most nerds browse product discovery sites. VC's don't care either (except for self-promotion).

This. I got more spam than actual users when I launched on Product Hunt. Pretty sure majority of people on PH are just there to promote their own services and products.

If I have a problem and want to buy a solution to that problem, I'll use a search engine to find what solutions are available. I won't check a list of new solutions to problems on a daily basis in the hope that one day a solution to my problem will be on there.

Product Hunt is the tech founder equivalent of refreshing your social media profile, watching the like count increase on your latest selfie.

I used to enjoy browsing PH and learn about all the cool projects people were building. And there were actually very good ideas -- at least in the early days of the community.

I even used to play a game that I've called PH-roulette: I'd open the top 10 or so products in separate tabs without reading their taglines. I then try to guess what they do based on the copy of landing page.

On most days, only one or 2 products had clear descriptions that are actually useful.

I started playing this game out of boredom but ended up learning a lot about what not to do while building my own landing pages.

Would love to read more about your insights. Maybe not here bc OT

I think that's right in the first order, but the second order is that journalists and gadget enthusiasts do, and they may write about your product. That happened to me with my Show HN post on here.

Agreed. I think it's worth posting on it but the right attitude is just treat it as any other outlet to post your product. Don't fret too much about it or spend too much time prepping and trying to game the timing.

When I've posted projects on there, I found so many bots commenting and then later got several emails from people wanting to "help" me with upvoting for a fee, it made me realize how fake it was.

Product Hunt turned into a meta-game long ago. Getting attention on Product Hunt is more about collecting a metric for your Product Manager resume these days.

There is an anti-pattern in Product Management where some PMs want to build the product launch around making a big splash on Product Hunt. Anyone who knows the drill won’t allow this and will instead do what’s best for finding customers, but I’ve seen some naive startups get pulled into chasing the Product Hunt launch follows by disappointment when the Product Hunt launch signup cohort has the worst retention rate of any of their signups.

what is the play those PMs go for, and how does one recognize it?

It's an accomplishment for their resume. Something to use to get the next job that advances their career.

You know how we joke about RDD - Resume Driven Development for developers who push projects that will look good on their resume even if it doesn't benefit the company? Playing games like this is the equivalent for product managers

Yes, I get that this is the objective. I'm asking what the play is, i.e. what they do to get to that objective. What are the actions they take, and how does one recognize them?

You wont, at least not directly. But indirectly it can help downstream. I still know investors who browse it every once in awhile looking for interesting products. ChatGPT has also cited a few products in PH lists to me too. So no you wont find users but it aint useless either

What do people use now?

This gave me one of those surreal "huh" moments I've had in awhile. I've seen loads of apps boasting about being "#1 on Product Hunt" or whatever and I just realised that I've never actually gone to Product Hunt looking for a product to use. Does make you wonder who Product Hunts audience really is and who is doing all the upvoting?

When there were a lot of indiehacker people active on Twitter, a lot of them seemed to talk a lot about using Product Hunt, but I think they were just helping their friends out when one of them posted there.

The audience is almost literally no one, the people doing the upvoting are doing it for subhuman wages in developing countries, and the only scrap of value created is a "#1 on Product Hunt" badge that doesn't even impress developers anymore, let alone your users.

I launched on PH last year and came to the same conclusion as the author of the post. The platform is dead, and deserves to stay dead.

Ever since it began I didn't understand Product Hunt. It's basically a subreddit full of nothing but ads - who would browse that?

I don't count myself as a Product Hunt audience, but I have visited the site couple, maybe dozens of times. However, it was just brief casual checking to see what's out there. I guess "#1 on Product Hunt" has somehow been burned into my subconscious.

It is the product launch channel of a bygone era.

Seems like these days people try to announce products in communities that might use them.

I feel this.

Tried launching something in 2022. Night of the launch, my whole team pulls an all nighter.

Some launches suddenly pull ahead with 20 upvotes right out of the gate. We have a handful. I see the same LinkedIn messages this author cites, but I ignore them. Why cheat?

Once someone secure a top spot, all the traffic goes to those apps, and they stay ahead to matter what. Accumulative advantage.

1 hour later, we get hit with a cyberattack. We don’t have rate limiters on sending invites from validated users, and someone overwhelms that system. All the queues are flooded and grind to a halt.

We work furiously to resolve it. It takes hours to get everything flushed and healthy again.

We ended in 9th place or something.

Never again. I realized it’s just pay to play.

Also Product Hunt is no substitute for a marketing plan but for a large number of people it is.

“all the traffic goes to those apps” - that was true in 2022 but now just there is not any traffic. In 2022 i ranked 14th with my product and got about 250 visitors. 1 month ago my friend ranked 7th and got about 50…

Product Hunt launches have been gamed ever since it gained some notoriety. If your product team wasn’t coordinating with all of their friends and family to create accounts ahead of time and seed them with some fake activity before they all upvoted on launch day in exchange for a gift card, you weren’t going toward the top.

I associate ProductHunt with lots of rocket emojis and artificial-seeming comments congratulating the company on launching. There is usually zero discussion of the product itself, so the whole thing came off as a way to advertise for free. Dead Internet Theory in action.

Yes, DIT is dead on. Though not completely for free. Front page is gonna cost ya $100-200.

It’s not just PH, it’s that entire subculture of “founders” or whatever you want to call it, that is just 99% fake and sucks balls.

This is true these days. The biggest calling card for the non-hacker pg callback founder is a forbes 30u30 inclusion - almost nothing worse.

It seriously lacked what discussion happens in a Product Review or Design Review internally (ideally) at a company.

I don't know if it's fair to call this a dead-internet thing. Most comments on social media are nothing or misdirection. You might say "well that's easy if you're paying for fake activity from bots" but I've seen plenty of real people have transactional, nothing-exchanges in real life. I mean, the internet isn't the only place where people are fake/lazy.

If you want to see purified, epiphany-grade Dead Internet, I recommend the "games" category.

Launching is hard. I put my own side project on HN https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45345623 a few days ago and it got exactly zero traction. At first it stung, but then I checked https://news.ycombinator.com/shownew and realized: someone launches something literally every few minutes. The odds are just stacked.

Whether it's Product Hunt, HN, or even LinkedIn (I actually saw better response there lol), it feels like everyone's throwing spaghetti at the same wall at the same time. Pre-internet, that spaghetti was launch parties and press releases. Same energy, same lottery odds.

What seems to work better is launching to people who already know you (e.g. your list), who have the problem you're solving, and are actually waiting for your product. Everything else is just noise.

Wow I didn't expect show new to have such high numbers.

But what are you gonna do? Some very impactful projects and startups opened posts here and got 0 traction.

I’ve found HN traffic to be the “worst” of any traffic. Zero engagement. Much better to spend some time doing SEO and getting a dozen search traffic than a “thousand” hit from HN. I wish I was exaggerating.

I always thought Product Hunt, due to a16z investing in it back in 2014, was more of a media engine for their own portfolio companies than anything else.

Maybe I wrongly assumed all these years.

https://techcrunch.com/2014/10/08/product-hunt-gets-6-1-mill...

Well, it's not a bad thesis in 2014. They seem to have had a pretty big hand in killing their baby in 2022, by bundling it with a crypto startup with a URL that already fails to DNS resolve <3 years later: https://a16z.com/announcement/investing-in-prologue/

“Web3 is the next big leap for computing” in the first paragraph is a giveaway for a post that was written in that short window between Covid and the FTX collapse.

The shitcoins are still with us, but at least nobody pretends they’re going to be used for anything except things like bribing the president.

All you have to do is look at the minuscule number views on any YouTube video links shared with a new product on PH.

I've seen products with upvotes in the hundreds, yet it has single digit views on the related product video.

One would think if there was real interest someone would click to watch a video?

Exactly. The PH docs make a big deal about having a video demo, too. Then they go ahead and hand-pick launches to feature that don't even meet that criterion. And for what?

For returns on investment

> One would think if there was real interest someone would click to watch a video?

If a third-party product PR fluff-piece gets me interested in a product, I click over to the product's own site (and maybe watch a first-party video, if available.) I trust the product's vendor to understand and explain the product's USP a lot better than some third-party marketing agency will.

They offer YouTube views on any video for $50 per 1,000 views as part of the Product Hunt upvote package.

You can easily decide to purchase the views at the time of purchase of the Product Hunt upvote package.

Product Hunt has been always been native marketing for VCs to launder perceived credibility to products they fund, and for PH that's not a bug, it's a feature.

The root problem particularly in 2025 is that discovery for new products is dead as the social frameworks such as have died out for various reasons, such as X's algorithm being very unfriendly to external links. There's a reason that most talked about tech products are for reasons extrinsic to the quality of the product itself, such as their founders (e.g. Cluely). The days of an indie project from an unknown developer going viral organically on Hacker News and getting massive interest of VCs have long since been over: hell, even Launches from YC companies on Hacker News don't get buzz anymore.

It's a really weird time we're living in now. I could at least tell 10 years ago a launch would get often times buzz primarily because of the quality of the product. Nowadays the coin has flipped - the buzz is usually about anything else but the actual product.

I couldn't imagine a better way to describe the current concept of grassroots marketing. Spam, and frankly heavy-handed and bad ways to resolve it (no links get traction, etc) have effectively closed the door here.

Anti-spam teams for a lot of social companies are under the umbrella of customer experience, and considered a cost center. The goal quickly becomes: be a hammer.

The impact to user experience, specifically around casual discovery has been profound.

At this point, PH is more for SEO because, once you hit the top, tons of other websites will link to your product.

FinFam looks amazing. It's an interesting take on personal finance because I never really have a view of my own net worth. And, because of that, I have been having a feeling for a while that it causes me to be "too frugal" most of the times.

Yep, from a founder's perspective PH is mostly an SEO thing. I'm not sure if it's the _best_ SEO thing, but I guess that's part of being a first-time founder!

Re: feeling too frugal, my friends came up with a name for it, "poor man brain" lol. I talk a little about it here: https://sedimental.org/announcing_finfam.html

Yeah, I think a lot of people who break into tech have a bit of a struggle to adjust to a high TC. I still remember back in the days having a convo about how Subway offered $8 for a foot long and we could eat it for both lunch and dinner during weekend... such a good deal. Meanwhile the company we were at was going IPO. Good old days lol.

The backlinks derived from PH are generally considered harmful, and rightfully so. It's gamed beyond belief. There is not much to gain from being at the top of PH other than talking about it to legacy VCs.

I feel like it died in about 2015.

Product hunt was always "artificial". Having done a few launches there, I highly prefer doing an HN launch. HN yields more traffic anyway (like x3-x10 more depending on what you launched).

yeah, only if you target only devs

ProductHunt has been dead ever since marketers have figured out how to game it and "optimize" it like any other search engine. Same as Google Search. Smart people caught on, moved on elsewhere, and the only people left are the other marketers who trade upvotes amongst themselves.

One time I was at a Holiday Inn at the same time as some multi-level marketer (pyramid scheme) conference. Breakfast conversation sounded like this:

Girl 1: "You should really check out Mary Kay, I'm making a fortune and could use help!"

Girl 2: "I'm not interested because I'm too busy making a fortune selling Herbalife, would love to send you some materials if you're interested!"

Girl 3: "Wow, that sounds great, I'd join you both if I weren't so busy getting rich selling the wonderful products in this Amway catalogue! Here's my card."

...This is what Product Hunt felt like the last time I visited organically like 7 years ago.

Somehow in the early days it didn't though, it felt like more of a community finding cool new stuff. Encouraging people to turn their PH launch into an "event" poisoned the well I think.

This confirms what I believed for years. PH suffers from a fundamentally flawed incentive system that, by game theory, inevitably triggers a race to the bottom, forcing participants to cheat. Because if some cheat and you don’t, then you don’t rank. Cheating became a must.

The mechanism in which founders were indirectly forced by the platform’s reward system to spam and beg their networks for votes was surely great for PH’s traction, but the collapse was inevitable as it didn’t drive lasting value for platform participants.

The core idea that the products that rank high are those worth your attention only works if votes aren’t biased or manipulated.

So any alternative would need to get the incentive systems right so that actions are aligned with genuine discovery and long-term value creation, not short-term vote gaming.

I agree with this take, Product Hunt felt like it was chasing short term goals instead of building something sustainable They also allowed and sometimes encouraged behavior that undermined the quality of the site

The last time I used it one of the common hacks was adding 50 makers to a single app launch PH also openly condoned mass email blasts and tweets to drive votes which just rewarded whoever could push the hardest on promotion

In contrast Hacker News discourages asking people for upvotes and even treats it as a negative if you do That longterm focus on signal over hype is probably why HN still feels useful today while PH lost its way

Agreed OP. I could see ProductHunt being a place for product-oriented people and founders to form a community and collaborate (constructive feedback, partnerships, etc). Sadly, most of the activity there lately seems to be people quickly creating accounts, launching their vibe-coded app, and then moving on. I've stopped visiting regularly until the maintainers make improvements to foster more of a community and bring people back to the site.

If you had told me Product Hunt was actually dead, I wouldn't know if the top of my head if you were telling the truth. I haven't paid attention to it in 6 or 7 years. At one point, I'd visit to find something new, useful, or cool. Over time I started seeing little more than tiny iterations on the trend of the moment, and never really found anything worth visiting.

I strongly agree with your point. I came across an article that tracked SaaS projects launched on PH between January and June 2024. As of now, 91.2% have fewer than 100 active users, and 84.6% haven’t been updated since the month they launched.

https://launchdirectories.com/

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44668574

Woooow, there are so many! Impressive list, but do any of them work?

hehe not really. But I did find https://peerlist.io/ from that list. And it's a nice community.

Aren't all these directories just paid for links? Like, who is actually browsing all these looking for tools?

That duck is the poetic epitome of Product Hunt. Sadly, and descriptively.

My only PH launch was a memorably bad experience. Competing in real time with whoever else launched that day, in a game where the rules are mysterious and the outcomes are inconsequential.

Not only Product Hunt, the entire Web 2.0 has passed away, having near completely lost any sincere commitment to service and quality in favor of quick return on investment.

The idea is still valid though - user generated content which evaluates and provides feedback to other users and producers through which quality floats to the top. The "only" piece missing is how to protect against various vested interests that pull in other directions ...

A thing I find odd about Product Hunt is that I have only ever heard about it in the context of founders launching, through HN. I've never read anything from a user's perspective, no "I found this cool thing on Product Hunt" posts.

Do people really go there to just discover what other random new site launched today? Do people actually crave yet more new apps?

Product Hunt died a few years back. Can't say it was good when it lasted.

I also wonder whether software products can be discovered through a launch any longer. Just too much noise and high throughput at which they are being released - once u get past the page all products look like they were baked by clones or a completely divergent one that needs investment.

The launch model is broken.

So, basically Product Hunt has become a paid ads platform - only that you wouldn't pay Product Hunt but external service providers. I wonder why PH doesn't take the money directly and switch the business model to some kind of advertising auction. Might be more fair and transparent.

Indeed

I always associated product hunt with low quality and usually throwaway/zero moat type stuff. Maybe I’m wrong.

totally this.

recently posted my opensource enterprise browser on producthunt - https://www.producthunt.com/products/wootzapp-ai-enforced-en...

did decently (but not in top 10). I got a lot of the same linkedin comments with "we even gave you some reviews for free to show we are serious". Said no to them and that turned into retribution.

started getting negative comments https://postimg.cc/n9tDDB0S . had to stay up all night to reply to negative comments with link to my github showing the source :(

for some reason they all deleted themselves (or got removed). not sure.

How long until products are dead? If AI can build UI on the fly, encode my desires, and launch infra to serve them, won’t I soon be able to cut out the middleman?

The reign of product management is coming to a close and I can’t wait. I want to be in control again.

If that's the future you're waiting for, you'll be waiting for a while. Better to get back in control now ;)

I’ve never used product hunt because most produce seem to be sht or some sort of promotion or a mix. The best way to find a product was to actually googling and then have Reddit or some forums surfacing it.

I used to check Product Hunt daily. I would literally visit every link, bookmark them etc. I had actually completely forgot it existed until this post. It has to be years since I have visited.

The author assumes that he's talking to legitimate vote-riggers, and not just people who will screenshot successful posts, say it was their doing, pocket his money and block him.

supjeff, the author has screenshots of linkedin convos transacting with other businesses. there are also actual users on the product hunt site. the grift is real, and not just on LinkedIn.

my thesis is that collections of products (whether that's ProductHunt or r/productivityapps) decline in quality due to self promotion. So i attempted to start r/curatedapps a couple of days ago which forbids self promotion and encourages people to become curators instead. i hope it succeeds! im starved for learning more about new tech innovations :)

ProductHunt may be dead, but prestigehunt lives on!

I still check in on PH from time to time. It's rarely productive (mostly mental junk food), but once in a while something interesting shows up. For years it's been dominated by self-promotion, grift, and shallow thought-leadership, and that trajectory always felt inevitable tbh.

> And it's predatory to foster a "community" where clout peddlers can predate on a

The sentence is missing the ending.

Here's the rest of it: > ... well-constructed sentence.

I have been a product hunt disciple for years and whilst I dont have or ever had a startup to push, I loved discovering great new ideas and products via PH. I had the RSS feed and went thru it diligently every day, interacted with users, gave feedback, praise, critiques.

That was up until 3 or 4 years ago.

Nowadays, I get the newsletter and may glance at it. It is now full of bots & BS marketeers and every product is AI related which people have put together during their lunch or coffee break. 99% of any feedback is never read, no one replies to any questions and it is just an extension of the pure BS you get on Linkedin.

It has gone from my fave site to one I go to for a laugh at the over the top AI slop.

Or zombified at least. Here's the meat: https://sedimental.org/product_hunt_is_dead.html#the-zombie-...

You linked to the same thing twice?

ah, meant to link straight to the receipts. fixed, thanks!

More often than not there are interesting finds on Product Hunt but nothing that's really valuable

It's been dead a loooong time

Was it ever alive? I never understood the premise. It’s for, what, people who feel they don’t spend enough money and are looking for new things to subscribe to? Is that a big market?

Take the seo, but don't waste any time with PH (or any other alternatives)

When you post a product, you get flooded with spam emails

Is there a good popular version of a site like alternative.to for SaaS apps?

Google AI search makes it pretty easy to find alternatives in most product categories, but sometimes the explicit organization is useful for very new items.

AlternativeTo is full of SaaS apps! If you're not finding one, you should join and add it :)

Thanks! I'll check that out. Didn't know if there was some other site that was more popular than AlternativeTo for Saas/web-apps.

You're looking for an alternative to AlternativeTo

Ha! https://alternativeto.net/software/alternativeto/

Just don't search for AlternativeTo on alternativeto.net, this will break the Internet!

Lol user generated votes are garbage. Everyone eventually catches on. It's why YC only tried the "HN users get to pick a startup to fund" one time and then gave up on it.

It's a tough day for Product Hunt fans. Luckily, I'm here to finish the job and perform the post-mortem with SubmitHunt.com

I've "discovered" Product Hunt today, from this article, and my first impression is that it is the hub of a subculture of useless dotcoms launching useless pseudoproducts.

There might be something good, or at least profitable, in the middle of this slop of misplaced effort, but upvotes and recency are not useful metrics for someone hunting for a product.

It's another signal of growing internet balkanization trend as online communities pivot to being more exclusive to mirror real-world communities. Once the A.I. farms take over, people flee.

Public forums → group chats, Yelp → Beli , Twitter → X / Bluesky / Gab / Rumble , IG Posts → DMs + Stories, FB Newsfeed → Groups

Product Hunt → Discord, AI-rugpull bots, TBD?

I like the duck.

Thanks! Pro-Duck Hunt. It's right there, not sure how they missed it.

I won a Product Hunt hackathon in ~2015 by making a Produck Hunt game (where you used your phone like the gun): https://www.producthunt.com/products/produck-hunt/launches/p...

And they're still sticking to the kitty 10 years later? There are kids launching apps born after the extinction of Google Glass.

where should i launch my product then?

Show HN! Or, another commenter mentioned peerlist. But the real answer is (from the post): wherever your customers are.

Has Product Hunt ever been anything other than grift?

I never understood the appeal in the first place.

In theory it’s a place for you to do a quick check of “is this a good idea or thing to work on”. In practice it’s a bunch of serial founders upvoting each others ideas.

Oh it's just pretending to be dead to get attention.

See??? Now everybody's talking about it again, after it was so long forgotten.

Don't fall for it!

It's just been grift for a long time.

I am wondering why?

OFC when you clearly kick out every successful developer keeping strictly narratived ones... Lately non one cares how powerful you are, you be with progress or be history.

What's this in reference to...?

Well well downvoted again, I am laughing it out :))

>What's this in reference to...? To me personally and many others stating the facts in different forums how their account got closed when they got popular. People wont let it go so easy, they worked hard. You either don´t accept an account since the beginning or once accepted can´t be closed later because becoming popular, nonsense. I know this will be downvoted and sent to the bottom as always but Producthunt, Google, Youtube are history (the new blockbuster). I will never use them again personally (even if they pay me), and so are doing all the others.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com