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Ask HN: Is ProductHunt trustworthy/relevant anymore?

18 points by geobadawi ↗ HN
ProductHunt has transformed from being a website where users can submit and vote for good products into an online army of marketers, influencers and companies that pay insiders and hunters to feature their products on the homepage which is seen mostly by other marketers and influencers instead of real users. Almost anybody who dealt with PH know how things work (let a popular hunter or insider hunt your product for you in workdays very early EST; make your employees, friends and everyone you know upvote it in the first hour after the submission (I've even seen many times on freelance websites people who want to get 50-200 upvote deals for money ahead of the submission, and you will find many indians who would accept this task for less than a couple of hundred dollars), get your product featured in the frontpage and get traffic for sometime and then hope that your product won't be forgotten after that).

Is this relevant anymore? the whole thing became obviously so fake and rigged (excluding rare cases of good products that were featured without intentional intervention) that I don't even see the featured products anymore. Do you think I am exaggerating or think I am right?

13 comments

[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 39.3 ms ] thread
mindcrime
When was Product Hunt ever relevant? It's been a joke from day one as far as I can see. Just more inward looking, meta navel-gazing crap. Like you say, the intended audience is not real users anyway.
minimaxir
Unfortunately, a lot of new entrepreneurs took Product Hunt to be gospel, and getting on the top of Product Hunt to be the primary objective of a startup launch, even if it means gaming the system.
geobadawi
The thing is, even if you had 3000 upvotes for instance, all you will most probably get is fake hope of a successful launch, upvotes will be mostly either by: other hunters, founders, infuluencers who didn't even read the description or care a bit about your product, or by newly registerd users who want to skip the welcome page or just trying to understand how this website works by upvoting anything on the home page and then forget about it.
codegladiator
I registered on PH once to post about my product. It made me upvote at least 10 products across a span of 3 days (should be 3 contagious days). You know how I did those.
tedmiston
They added the 3 day check to reduce spam from newly registered users.
minimaxir
As one of the people who spent a lot of time calling out Product Hunt's shenanigans, I've actually had the same question.

I have seen little-to-no discussion about it in the past year on social media/Medium thought pieces, but they have made site redesigns and product releases (e.g. Ship) since.

Jack000
I had a few projects featured in September and the valuable traffic came from secondary sources - social media, blog posts etc. I think ph is less about users and more about social proof.
ecesena
I don't fully understand the question. What would your expectation from PH be? And why is it deluded?

This kind of sites are followed by people who want to know the next thing. By definition, these people will try a lot of new apps/saas/etc., and so hardly they would be very engaged with yours, as with anything else. However you can get quite some good feedback on specific parts of your project.

I don't see PH to be particularly different, in style and "how to get around the system", than Show HN. The population is prob just different.

For example, I'm personally working on a password manager, and I chose to do a Show HN to gather technical feedback. When I'll work more on the ux/onboarding experience, I'll prob post it to PH to get some feedback on that. In neither case I'd expect to find tons of paying customers. I expect valuable feedback, and perhaps one or two advocates.

AznHisoka
PH suffers from the fact there are only 1-2 actual useful online products released per week.

So most of the stuff you see arent really products like guides to hacking X or curated lists of podcasts. Or Iphone X. so uninteresting.

borplk
Sadly I find that most of the "products" posted are extremely shallow and meta.
thecupisblue
2 comments here really matched my opinion.

> a lot of new entrepreneurs took Product Hunt to be gospel .

This is true. I've been in the PH community for 2-3 years, posted a bunch of products, some frontpaging some not. Problem is that now if you post a product that you found and think is cool you might see founders being angry at you because "they were planning for a PH launch and you ruined it!". I've had moments like that where they'd message me asking to delete their product or telling me I shouldn't have posted their product because they were planning for it. Such bullshit.

and

>PH suffers from the fact there are only 1-2 actual useful online products released per week.

True. Lately products have been in 4 categories: "Collection of links to X", "Guide to Y", "Clone of Z" and "New product by a popular company".

Also, the community became kinda shit.

A lot of people won't say anything bad about a product. I saw a product that was made by a "meta-influencer" (eg someone who made a bunch of kinda useless products but that was the reason he was popular in the community) and it was terrible - the UI sucked, the privacy settings were terrible and it broke all the rules of making a quality mobile app. I commented on this stuff and nobody really cared, while comments praising him were at the top saying the app was amazing (it was not. it was basic, terrible and broken in many places). There are a lot of products like that that are shitty or useless, but people still praise them because what was once a "positive but critical community" turned into a "toxic positivity community" that is afraid to call out people on their shit.