Tell HN: Product Hunt is full of shill accounts, paid upvotes and spam
Today, it has become a pyramid scheme of paid upvotes, shill accounts, and rampant spam. And nobody is talking about it.
Have a look at Today's #2Product of the Day with 500+ upvotes. They are ALL sock puppet accounts, and most comments and upvotes within a short period of time.
The comments are all obvious astro-turfing, with names like "AccountHolder2". Most of the other top products of the day have the same problem. See for yourself here:
https://www.producthunt.com/posts/teyuto-2
Something is deeply rotten with Product Hunt. There are maybe 2 or 3 posts in the top products of the day that aren't full of utter garbage comments from fake accounts.
I shared a link to this before and it was marked as Dead. I'm assuming because the system thought it was promoting someone's Product Hunt launch rather than pointing out a huge failing in one of the most important communities online.
Most upvotes are commercially driven. It seems like something that could be fixed with reasonable moderation.
35 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 75.8 ms ] threadFor years, "#1 on ProductHunt" is a strong signal to me to stay away. It means the product is not much more than a landing page and is run by marketers trying to fake it until they make it.
But it clearly became garbage at some point. Personally I stopped visiting when it seemed like a good 40%+ of the “products” were ‘info products’, courses and mostly insignificant curations of other products.
I liked it when it was a ‘dedicated show HN, with some polish’. But it didn’t last. And I didn’t find anything else of value there.
That's my (current) dream.
Nah, it wasn't always this way. I was in the first 10k users back in ~2014.
There are many legit startups and products on there from years ago, when startup product people treated it like their version of HN. At that time it was very well curated, and they had good protection against voting rings -- many startup people used to send out direct links to their posting in their network and then they eventually started penalizing that type of vote.
I don't use it much these days, but there's a lot of good (and well-pknown) stuff in this top 1000 leaderboard [1].
[1]: https://pesto.app/leaderboard-for-product-hunt/
A tool to create random colors? 500 votes.
NoCode platform for videogames really well done? 5 votes.
Stuff like PH is a boondoggle.
I dropped out 2 years ago despite being on there since 2015 which in my opinion was its peak. It was a great place to chat with others about what everyone is building, with their own hands, but now there are too many solutions looking for a problem.
At least hacker news has managed to keep somewhat neutral, despite having its own share of criticisms.
That means it cannot be fixed, because the spammers are a billion developing world schoolchildren posting from their phones because some game or app gives them a micron of credit if they post a comment, while your moderators need a modicum of trust.
I am an approved submitter there and I can confirm that there are a bunch of FB pages for producthunters to ask for upvotes from one another.
Why would anyone go on producthunt and browse new products? When I need something I google. But having a vanity plate on landing page "product of the day" gives social value, so product creators abuse the system.
Same thing goes for reddit reviews. If you go to any subreddit multiple times a day someone would ask for a recommendation. Normal user might spent 5 seconds answering "I use product X. Its good". But if I am a marketer in firm making X, I can write long, seemingly unbiased overview, then mentioning X is best. I get paid to do so.
> It seems like something that could be fixed with reasonable moderation.
This has got to be peak HN naivete
The domains I had in mind:
productrant.org
productc*nt.org
productant.org
I finally settled on productrant.org started working on my first bigger piece and then the war in Ukraine broke out and abolished my enthusiasm.
I do not see it as a potent commercial project, I think I am just at that stage of life when I want to reach "best" section at HN once and subsequently get comments explaining how wrong I am about everything.
Thoughts on the domain? The overall idea? Thanks!
Alternatively, I work with WordPress and ever-hated SEO for some years now[1] and most of the things surrounding these two things is a scheme made to extract money from end-users. Should I focus on that? For example, if you look for "free wordpress themes 2022" you will find that the first page of Google results is all listicles of freemium themes that are years old. Of course the "best" themes are the ones who offer affiliate program.
This is both fail of Google and WordPress, if you ask me. I started a sheet of all the websites deems quality results on this search query and linked together the repeated offenders, I want to use as much data as possible to support my salty opinions. The thing is... does anyone even care about this?
[1] https://theseoframework.com, SEO plugin for WordPress, FOSS, currently around 150k users, operated mostly by 2 guys.
They even forgot to remove the instruction on how to write the original comment. What a joke.
When we launched on PH we did zero marketing for it and you do get some nice comments and replies from it. Even with zero marketing we managed to get top 10 of the day, but I am sure you can really game the system with some real effort or by using a bunch of fake supporters.
"K". "Be patient". "Jjdd". "I'm a college". "Hi". "simple man". "hello iam hunting the products". And, last but not least, "Bio".
Another big hint are the reviews:
https://www.producthunt.com/posts/teyuto-2/reviews
A lot of the "reviews" are vague to the point of meaninglessness (like "My experience in site is amzing good"), seem confused about what the product is (e.g. one review claiming that "this is great project for YouTube users"), or parrot what are obviously marketing talking points (like "you are not paying $0.50 to $1.00 per user or 5% fee, while you build out a beautiful OTT platform").
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Hi ,
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Most 'products' are of very low quality, or nothing at all, e.g. "a collection of color palettes for your website". There are sites like AppSumo where you can buy lifetime licenses for SaaS software, and I've found that to be a better source of tools, because those are somewhat mature products with a specific audience in mind.
When I want to understand whether a product is good or bad I just ignore these quick reviews, and look for something more balaced explaining the good and bad points.