So you're not just a "sarcastic tech blog commentator", but also a harsh blog post commentator :) But you're right. Removed it. Thx for reading til the end.
What is a harsh comment (and an annoying trend among all the "I got on Product Hunt: look at me!" posts) is that you encourage vote cheating ("It is perfectly fine, however, to promote your Product Hunt page on your groups, forums, internal communications, etc. Introduce your community to the featuring on ProductHunt, but don’t encourage them to vote one way or another.") because it isn't explicitly against the rules, but you don't realize why that's a bad and unethical thing to do.
[Disclaimer : I know Batch's founder, but this comment will try to be very objective]
Allow me to disagree. Product Hunt is a platform that lets users vote for the best products. Asking for upvotes is wrong, because the people you ask feel obligated to do it. When you let people know you're on Product Hunt, they have the choice to go upvote or not. If it's a good product, they will go and upvote it. But this is the essence of Product Hunt. Filter good products and make other users aware of good products.
> When you let people know you're on Product Hunt, they have the choice to go upvote or not. If it's a good product, they will go and upvote it.
But if you are promoting to people who are your friends or are already fans of your product per the original quote, they are not necessarily unbiased and are not necessarily voting on the merit of the product itself.
> But if you are promoting to people who are your friends or are already fans of your product per the original quote, they are not necessarily unbiased and are not necessarily voting on the merit of the product itself.
Their article states :
"It is perfectly fine, however, to promote your Product Hunt page on your groups, forums, internal communications [...] community to the featuring on ProductHunt, but don’t encourage them to vote one way or another."
They are not including "friends" in there. And when it comes to people who are already fans of your product, no - they're not unbiased. But that's the thing : they tried the product, and loved it. Which is exactly how word of mouth works in real life. You try a product, you love it, and you tell you friends about it. And that's the whole point of PH : surfacing great products.
I have to disagree with you on this one. This was discussed with the PH team beforehand. We wanted to know exactly what was cool to do, and what wasn't. And we followed their rules very closely.
It's impressive how much less influential TechCrunch has become. To me, it's pretty clear that the main reason is the sheer number of articles they publish every day. Even if the overall audience is very large, the audience for each article isn't so high. On the plus side, the people who read articles self-select and are by definition interested in the topic, so the conversion rate in the end is higher. Bottom line: with TC, you reach a wide audience and extract the few that are relevant to your product.
Let's just say that 6 years ago when I launched on TC, the traffic numbers were much higher.
You're absolutely right. It's interesting to see that more and more journalists focus on number of clics / views, vs actual engagement. I guess short term metrics like clics / views are one way to go, but definitely not a good one for journalism on the long term.
> [HN] ... get some friends to upvote the link early on, but don’t be tempted to try and game the voting system.
I'm puzzled by the idea that setting up an ad hoc voting ring (apparently with careful planning, as per the description on how to maximize the quality of the fraudulent clicks) is somehow not gaming the system.
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[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 31.8 ms ] threadWhat is a harsh comment (and an annoying trend among all the "I got on Product Hunt: look at me!" posts) is that you encourage vote cheating ("It is perfectly fine, however, to promote your Product Hunt page on your groups, forums, internal communications, etc. Introduce your community to the featuring on ProductHunt, but don’t encourage them to vote one way or another.") because it isn't explicitly against the rules, but you don't realize why that's a bad and unethical thing to do.
Allow me to disagree. Product Hunt is a platform that lets users vote for the best products. Asking for upvotes is wrong, because the people you ask feel obligated to do it. When you let people know you're on Product Hunt, they have the choice to go upvote or not. If it's a good product, they will go and upvote it. But this is the essence of Product Hunt. Filter good products and make other users aware of good products.
But if you are promoting to people who are your friends or are already fans of your product per the original quote, they are not necessarily unbiased and are not necessarily voting on the merit of the product itself.
Their article states : "It is perfectly fine, however, to promote your Product Hunt page on your groups, forums, internal communications [...] community to the featuring on ProductHunt, but don’t encourage them to vote one way or another."
They are not including "friends" in there. And when it comes to people who are already fans of your product, no - they're not unbiased. But that's the thing : they tried the product, and loved it. Which is exactly how word of mouth works in real life. You try a product, you love it, and you tell you friends about it. And that's the whole point of PH : surfacing great products.
See: https://twitter.com/ProductHunt/status/542336884861845504
Let's just say that 6 years ago when I launched on TC, the traffic numbers were much higher.
I'm puzzled by the idea that setting up an ad hoc voting ring (apparently with careful planning, as per the description on how to maximize the quality of the fraudulent clicks) is somehow not gaming the system.