Tried launching something in 2022. Night of the launch, my whole team pulls an all nighter.
Some launches suddenly pull ahead with 20 upvotes right out of the gate. We have a handful. I see the same LinkedIn messages this author cites, but I ignore them. Why cheat?
Once someone secure a top spot, all the traffic goes to those apps, and they stay ahead to matter what. Accumulative advantage.
1 hour later, we get hit with a cyberattack. We don’t have rate limiters on sending invites from validated users, and someone overwhelms that system. All the queues are flooded and grind to a halt.
We work furiously to resolve it. It takes hours to get everything flushed and healthy again.
I still check in on PH from time to time. It's rarely productive (mostly mental junk food), but once in a while something interesting shows up. For years it's been dominated by self-promotion, grift, and shallow thought-leadership, and that trajectory always felt inevitable tbh.
OFC when you clearly kick out every successful developer keeping strictly narratived ones...
Lately non one cares how powerful you are, you be with progress or be history.
I always thought Product Hunt, due to a16z investing in it back in 2014, was more of a media engine for their own portfolio companies than anything else.
Lol user generated votes are garbage. Everyone eventually catches on. It's why YC only tried the "HN users get to pick a startup to fund" one time and then gave up on it.
ProductHunt has been dead ever since marketers have figured out how to game it and "optimize" it like any other search engine. Same as Google Search. Smart people caught on, moved on elsewhere, and the only people left are the other marketers who trade upvotes amongst themselves.
Is there a good popular version of a site like alternative.to for SaaS apps?
Google AI search makes it pretty easy to find alternatives in most product categories, but sometimes the explicit organization is useful for very new items.
I associate ProductHunt with lots of rocket emojis and artificial-seeming comments congratulating the company on launching. There is usually zero discussion of the product itself, so the whole thing came off as a way to advertise for free. Dead Internet Theory in action.
Let me communicate this clearly for the subtype of HN users who are engaged in some startup thing: You won't find actual users for your product on Product Hunt because neither normal people nor most nerds browse product discovery sites. VC's don't care either (except for self-promotion).
One time I was at a Holiday Inn at the same time as some multi-level marketer (pyramid scheme) conference. Breakfast conversation sounded like this:
Girl 1: "You should really check out Mary Kay, I'm making a fortune and could use help!"
Girl 2: "I'm not interested because I'm too busy making a fortune selling Herbalife, would love to send you some materials if you're interested!"
Girl 3: "Wow, that sounds great, I'd join you both if I weren't so busy getting rich selling the wonderful products in this Amway catalogue! Here's my card."
...This is what Product Hunt felt like the last time I visited organically like 7 years ago.
Somehow in the early days it didn't though, it felt like more of a community finding cool new stuff. Encouraging people to turn their PH launch into an "event" poisoned the well I think.
Product hunt was always "artificial". Having done a few launches there, I highly prefer doing an HN launch. HN yields more traffic anyway (like x3-x10 more depending on what you launched).
Product Hunt has been always been native marketing for VCs to launder perceived credibility to products they fund, and for PH that's not a bug, it's a feature.
The root problem particularly in 2025 is that discovery for new products is dead as the social frameworks such as have died out for various reasons, such as X's algorithm being very unfriendly to external links. There's a reason that most talked about tech products are for reasons extrinsic to the quality of the product itself, such as their founders (e.g. Cluely). The days of an indie project from an unknown developer going viral organically on Hacker News and getting massive interest of VCs have long since been over: hell, even Launches from YC companies on Hacker News don't get buzz anymore.
did decently (but not in top 10). I got a lot of the same linkedin comments with "we even gave you some reviews for free to show we are serious". Said no to them and that turned into retribution.
started getting negative comments https://postimg.cc/n9tDDB0S . had to stay up all night to reply to negative comments with link to my github showing the source :(
for some reason they all deleted themselves (or got removed). not sure.
56 comments
[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 68.1 ms ] threadTried launching something in 2022. Night of the launch, my whole team pulls an all nighter.
Some launches suddenly pull ahead with 20 upvotes right out of the gate. We have a handful. I see the same LinkedIn messages this author cites, but I ignore them. Why cheat?
Once someone secure a top spot, all the traffic goes to those apps, and they stay ahead to matter what. Accumulative advantage.
1 hour later, we get hit with a cyberattack. We don’t have rate limiters on sending invites from validated users, and someone overwhelms that system. All the queues are flooded and grind to a halt.
We work furiously to resolve it. It takes hours to get everything flushed and healthy again.
We ended in 9th place or something.
Never again. I realized it’s just pay to play.
I've seen products with upvotes in the hundreds, yet it has single digit views on the related product video.
One would think if there was real interest someone would click to watch a video?
OFC when you clearly kick out every successful developer keeping strictly narratived ones... Lately non one cares how powerful you are, you be with progress or be history.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44668574
Maybe I wrongly assumed all these years.
https://techcrunch.com/2014/10/08/product-hunt-gets-6-1-mill...
Google AI search makes it pretty easy to find alternatives in most product categories, but sometimes the explicit organization is useful for very new items.
The sentence is missing the ending.
Girl 1: "You should really check out Mary Kay, I'm making a fortune and could use help!"
Girl 2: "I'm not interested because I'm too busy making a fortune selling Herbalife, would love to send you some materials if you're interested!"
Girl 3: "Wow, that sounds great, I'd join you both if I weren't so busy getting rich selling the wonderful products in this Amway catalogue! Here's my card."
...This is what Product Hunt felt like the last time I visited organically like 7 years ago.
Somehow in the early days it didn't though, it felt like more of a community finding cool new stuff. Encouraging people to turn their PH launch into an "event" poisoned the well I think.
The root problem particularly in 2025 is that discovery for new products is dead as the social frameworks such as have died out for various reasons, such as X's algorithm being very unfriendly to external links. There's a reason that most talked about tech products are for reasons extrinsic to the quality of the product itself, such as their founders (e.g. Cluely). The days of an indie project from an unknown developer going viral organically on Hacker News and getting massive interest of VCs have long since been over: hell, even Launches from YC companies on Hacker News don't get buzz anymore.
recently posted my opensource enterprise browser on producthunt - https://www.producthunt.com/products/wootzapp-ai-enforced-en...
did decently (but not in top 10). I got a lot of the same linkedin comments with "we even gave you some reviews for free to show we are serious". Said no to them and that turned into retribution.
started getting negative comments https://postimg.cc/n9tDDB0S . had to stay up all night to reply to negative comments with link to my github showing the source :(
for some reason they all deleted themselves (or got removed). not sure.