Ask HN: What's your take on Product Hunt?

10 points by HeyShayBY ↗ HN
Worth all the effort put into it, or just a one time hype(assuming you do well when you're hunted)?

16 comments

[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 38.8 ms ] thread
As a list of resources or as a company trying to get exposure?

As a list of resources I think it's great. Often, I've never heard of any day to day new items on there. Some are interesting, some I have no need for and some I could use some day.

I can't speak to being on there as a company but as I said above - I've never heard of or seen so much of what gets submitted to it - it could help get the word out.

As a company trying to get exposure :)
I enjoyed it before the rebrand, now I can't be bothered to wade through it. Before it was a real easy snapshot of the community interest, now it's some weird design all mashed together.
Not worth my time. It's incredibly boring.
It was this cycle's version of being featured on TechCrunch...now it's akin to being featured on TechCrunch after Arrington left.
I can't speak to it as a company either... but as an observer I'm pretty disappointed with it.

Unaffiliated people are prevented from commenting, meaning that every posting has a flood of positive, and completely useless comments.

Great site for astroturf, terrible for actually vetting a product.

That's exactly how I feel about it. I mean Show HN in my opinion is a much better vehicle for product feedback.
A time waster. Also agree with other commenter: whoever redesigned it deserves to be fired - what an unintuitive navigational mess. its a conglomerate mess with no consistent theme amongst the products. nobody looks for tech or podcasts. We look for Specific markets like productivity podcasts or marketing tech.
I doubt it will compensate for a lack of product-market fit for a startup. For a small business it might offer marketing value on a purely risk/reward analysis...that is it might average out across many companies that the total value of inorganic spikes exceeds the total cost of pursuing it.

Since it's a hype machine I doubt it, but it's possible. Mostly, I think it is a case of:

  We must do something.
  Product Hunt is something.
  Therefore, we must do it.
I like it. It is a great community with a bunch of people who love creating cool stuff, a lot of cool products to explore, a lot of new launches happen there and when I need a product I go to PH to search if something exists first, then google. Why? Because google is full of shit-tier SEO spam in most cases.
I use it like this as well. Catalogue aspect might be the most useful application of PH.
I used to go there in the early days. The UI was intuitive and neat products used to get hunted daily. The last straw for me was the ebooks that showed you How To Launch on Product Hunt. These ebooks and lists were like a whack-a-mole popping up every day getting voted to the top. Also how you can't comment unless you're invited by an insider killed it for me.
I stopped viewing it after the UI revamped. It sets me thinking when using it, like solving a mini puzzle.

I can't recommend enough the book Don't Make Me Think.

I preferred the old list style layout as I'm not a big fan of Horizontal scrolling.

I really like the collections feature - but I wish you could do a reverse collection search e.g Click on a Product and see what collections it appears in

UI revamp killed it for me too. Also the iOS app got unfortunately worse.