Comment by minimaxir | Hacker News Reader

Comment by minimaxir | Hacker News Reader

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The issue with Product Hunt is that they don't care about voting rings. Just look at Twitter for "product hunt upvote": https://twitter.com/search?q=product%20hunt%20upvote&src=typ...

I've criticized PH for allowing voting rings and being a "black box" in general with respect to voting (see interview in Recode which had a comment from me: http://recode.net/2015/06/18/product-hunt-the-startup-kingma... ). The response to that interview is essentially "haters gonna hate," which means all attempts at offering suggestions to improve Product Hunt will be futile.

Yes, it still an echo chamber which I believe actually hurts the startup community because it incentives them to work on products which have zero value outside the echo chamber. It also incentives this bad behavior, and it has been spreading outside of Product Hunt which is why I'm upset by it.

If Product Hunt has enough community awareness such that they can tweet a GIF to every user who gets more than 100 points (seriously?!), then they have enough manpower to effectively punish and discourage vote manipulators.

"Yes, it still an echo chamber which I believe actually hurts the startup community because it incentives them to work on products which have zero value outside the echo chamber."

This. I hate this. I love the idea behind Product Hunt and I was on there early on. I've discovered some great products from there but I find it increasingly becoming centered around Product Hunt itself and startups in general.

I suppose that's only natural as the community posts for the community, but I feel like there's so much more potential with a site like this.

I'm not in the valley. I'm in Chicago. And Product Hunt increasingly feels like some huddle of startup guys in the valley smiling at each other over the latest do-hickey they made.

Maybe an example of Goodhart's Law in effect?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law

(Cheers, from a fellow Chicagoan.)

We do have voting ring detection in place and often inform makers of our policy on Twitter when we see them asking for upvotes (often times they simply don't know it's not OK) in addition to highlighting this policy in the email that people receive when they're tagged as a maker.

Hi Ryan,

While I have to take your word that you tell people not to ask for votes, that's not sufficient to creating a fair system without manipulation. The Product Hunt demographic is "growth hackers" and scrappy entrepreneurs who want to do anything to get their startup to succeed. These are the same people who want to "move fast and break things." The flip side of that is that they know that what they do is wrong, but they can get away with it without much consequence.

Case in point, there's a lot of meta discussion on "how to tell people to vote for your PH submission without getting flagged by the voting ring detector" (http://www.reddit.com/r/startups/comments/36hsfc/product_hun... ) and "how to get upvotes on PH because you know an influential investor." (https://medium.com/ferris-life/zero-to-featured-how-ferris-c...).

Voting manipulation, not limited to but including voting rings, completely compromise Product Hunt mission to "find the best products." A one-liner in the FAQ will not resolve it, and I don't believe PH is doing enough to facilitate awareness and enforce that voting manipulation, in any form, is very bad.

(cto here)

We work similar to HN as we have spam rating on votes and devalue and derank posts based on those.

Essentially if you ask for upvotes there is a (almost too high) chance that our system will notice and punish your post for this. Sadly a lot of really good products drop because of this.

Regarding those blogposts - we don't really speak up if they are right or wrong (for obvious reasons) but those kind of articles exist for any system/website/mechanic/process where users believe they can get a benefit if they manipulate.

Wait, seriously? I had no idea it wasn't OK to asks for up-votes. I guess things have changed: https://twitter.com/rrhoover/status/453903533083856897

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