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Comment by willu | Hacker News Reader

I am a fan of ProductHunt and look forward to their emails. BUT I do have to gripe a bit about the current very limited, "exclusive" commenting system. I want to get real insights from people who have used the product/service being featured and instead it's usually just the guy who runs ProductHunt plus maybe one other friend or colleague who takes a couple of minutes to poke around providing pretty shallow feedback...and it's very rarely critical. Then an investor in the featured site/product chimes in about how awesome the team is. Not a lot of value there. Both consumers and founders would benefit from more openness.

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I hear you, willu! Currently the product isn't ready for completely open comments. It will get unwieldy if there are 100+ comments on each product and we don't have the team to handle potential spam yet.

We're in the process of building an recommendation system so people in the community can invite new contributors (a la dribbble). Here's a screenshot: https://twitter.com/rrhoover/status/480377375192932352

Thanks for your patience and sorry again to limit access but we're working to open it up!

First off Ryan, I think its a great platform. As a very frequent visitor to the site I would have to reiterate that it is frustrating that I can't really participate in the conversation where there is an aspect of the product that I would like to ask the founder more about. Hopefully you guys can create a way that doesn't result in spam, but feels a little more inclusive.

IMHO, a good way to do the comments would be to focus on Q&A with the founders (or someone affiliated with the product) address the question. As a visitor I would like to easily be able to see which questions have been answered instead of scrolling around to piece together the conversation.

Certainly looking forward to seeing what you have planned for PH.

Thanks for the feedback -- I too really like the conversations with founders/builders.

I'm actually testing threaded comments in staging right now (might release today) and soon after we are adding a "badge" next to the founder's name so that it's clear who made it.

Ryan, how does one submit a product for consideration (assuming they actually have a good product to submit)?

You could just copy the Hacker News / Reddit system for the comments? It seems to work pretty well in general.

HN and reddit are a lot more sophisticated with managing spam and abuse than we are today. They also have staff 100% focused on those challenges. We'll get there! :)

HN doesn't have any staff who are 100% focused on managing spam and abuse, though some days it's easy to feel otherwise.

Any plans for RSS?

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