[HN Gopher] Product Hunt isn't dying, it's becoming gentrified
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Product Hunt isn't dying, it's becoming gentrified
Author : padseeker
Score : 83 points
Date : 2024-09-30 18:42 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (launchpointzero.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (launchpointzero.com)
| ado__dev wrote:
| Product Hunt exists to make Product Hunt money and not promote
| your business.
|
| If you look at it through that lens, it makes perfect sense what
| is going on there.
| _pdp_ wrote:
| The only reason Product Hunt exists is because others use it to
| promote their business. ;) making money from all of this is
| simply a side-effect of the value add.
| bdcravens wrote:
| You could say that about any advertising product, none of
| which are necessarily altruistic.
| snapcaster wrote:
| I don't know anything about product hunt or the people discussed,
| but it is infuriating when a product person doesn't know the
| product. I'm happy to work at company currently where the product
| org is very competent and are "power users" of the products. I
| think it makes a HUGE difference
| dbreunig wrote:
| I launched an app on Product Hunt several months ago.
|
| I found the exercise of listing the app and creating the content
| for the listing a worthwhile exercise, but nothing else about the
| experience worthwhile.
|
| Every day its listings are filled with redundant apps, template
| shovelware, wrappers around AI APIs, and random non-app content
| (think ebooks, blog posts, courses, etc.) Very occasionally
| you'll find a useful utility or two by a independent team (but
| you gotta scroll wayyy down). PH has completely failed to defend
| their ranking algorithms against spam and brigading.
| gkoberger wrote:
| This is based on a very misleading typo.
|
| On Sept 25, Jason tweeted that the CTO (not CEO, as this article
| states) didn't know who levelsio is. In October, the CEO wrote
| about levelsio, so he does indeed know who he is.
| (https://www.linkedin.com/posts/rajiv-ayyangar_why-doesnt-pro...)
|
| Assuming it's true, I don't know if the CTO really needs to know
| who levelsio is. The CEO does, but does the CTO?
| padseeker wrote:
| I made a mistake, it will be corrected asap. Thanks for the
| heads up.
| gkoberger wrote:
| Doesn't it undermine your whole point, though? Your most
| damning point was at best a typo and at worst a fictional
| story.
|
| Like, don't you think the head of growth might have an
| incentive to cause the issues you're mentioning? Doesn't the
| CEO implying the story isn't true give you pause?
|
| Did you look at the head of growth's LinkedIn? Did nothing
| about their resume (which I won't post here) give you pause
| before writing a whole post?
|
| I agree Product Hunt is different than it was years ago. So
| is the entire startup ecosystem. But this article just came
| off as sour grapes, where you cherry-picked stories to try to
| make an argument.
| padseeker wrote:
| Are you saying that the one letter typo on the one of my
| many points surrounding the drama at Product Hunt discredit
| the whole thing? No I do not.
|
| Maybe I should have shared in the article all the twitter
| posts where indie hackers are upset how they are getting
| screwed and how hard it is to get ranked on PH. There is a
| lot more drama surrounding PH than just the CTO not knowing
| one well known community member.
| gkoberger wrote:
| Great, but you didn't share those.
|
| If you have a better post, I'd love to read it and I'm
| sure others here would too. But until I see that, I can
| only go off the words you've written.
| padseeker wrote:
| I'm sorry the post I wrote in a pinch and shared within
| 30 minutes and is free does not meet your standards for
| journalism.
|
| here's a couple of twitter feeds that center on the drama
| related to product hunt;
|
| https://x.com/WhoWorksThere/status/1840822087868375085
|
| https://x.com/csallen/status/1840792433447391560
|
| https://x.com/HeyImYossi/status/1840634391040577847
|
| theres a lot more in my feed and the people I follow this
| could be an all day thing but I hope this supports the
| headline of my post.
| padseeker wrote:
| here's another one where someone is complaining
|
| https://x.com/tibo_maker/status/1840656616032489754
| skmurphy wrote:
| Key points:
|
| 1. There are many to launch but most of the sites don't have the
| community or credibility that PH seems to have lost.
|
| 2. If you want what PH was 3-4 years ago you have to go somewhere
| else.
|
| 3. If you want to build the new Product Hunt you can't just
| create a site where people can submit their product and launch.
| You need affordances that cultivate community.
|
| 4. Once you get traction you should expect some members will game
| your system: successful systems always attract parasites.
| skmurphy wrote:
| I think these two articles are relevant for #4
|
| https://gwern.net/doc/technology/2005-shirky-agroupisitsownw...
|
| https://www.skmurphy.com/blog/2014/09/15/guidelines-for-an-o...
| PaulHoule wrote:
| I don't believe in the value of the Product Hunt "community".
|
| The point of marketing is to get your product in front of
| customers, not to get it front of members of a community of
| deadbeat marketers who think they're doing their job when they
| get their product in front of non-customers. If your product is
| "one weird trick" to get your product on the top of Product
| Hunt that's appropriate for Product Hunt, but that's about it.
| minimaxir wrote:
| > The point of marketing is to get your product in front of
| customers, not to get it front of members of a community of
| deadbeat marketers
|
| But what if the customers _are_ deadbeat marketers?
| skmurphy wrote:
| One of the challenges in reaching customers is that someone
| else may have already assembled groups of them in the form of
| website audiences and communities. Some of those sites will
| accept sponsorships or ads, others--for example HN--are the
| result of audience members voting on your submission.
|
| Assuming you believe that getting visibility on Product Hunt
| will draw the attention of prospects--I agree a potentially
| dubious assumption--you may need to find ways to cultivate
| "deadbeat marketeers." From what I understand, not everyone
| who submits a product the first time gains widespread
| visibility, so they must submit multiple times. Here might be
| a second reason to consider how to be a member in good
| standing of a community whose approval will be of benefit.
|
| Obviously your mileage may vary.
| ryandrake wrote:
| Any "Ranking of X" or "Curated List of Y" becomes useless and
| untrustworthy as soon as a cottage industry springs up around it
| where people can pay to boost their ranking or get on the lists.
| SEO, Amazon ratings, YouTube recommendations, even meatspace
| things like college rankings. This seems like The Big Problem
| that recommendation / discovery sites have been failing to solve
| for decades.
| lovethevoid wrote:
| They haven't been failing to solve it, that's what they're
| explicitly optimizing for.
| andrewstuart wrote:
| Maybe all sites aimed at indie developers become a spammy sleaze
| district given time and it's necessary for a new site to arise
| where initially only the techy developer entrepreneurs hang until
| the sleaze follows and the cycle repeats.
|
| I've been reading that the same thing has happened to indie
| hackers.
| minimaxir wrote:
| "Becoming" gentrified?
|
| Product Hunt's value proposition since the beginning was to
| launder credibility from "friends"/VCs promoting apps without
| having to disclose conflicts of interests. It never was fair to
| indie creators and able to fulfill its stated purpose of
| surfacing the best products.
| andrewstuart wrote:
| If you are coming up with the"next product hunt", please ensure
| the list of launched companies is one straight list of all the
| companies in random order.
|
| It's never made sense that PH shows only a selection of the
| launches and you need to click to see them all ... that's
| fundamentally unfair.
|
| Also, there should be no new launches to be added to the list -
| it should accumulate launches for the past 24 hours hidden and
| then launch them all simultaneously - the time that a product as
| added to the list in the past 24 hours should not be a factor in
| how many upvotes it gets. Related, it should not be important to
| launch at 12:00PM pacific time or whatever it is - makes no
| sense.
|
| Maybe there should be AI trained to categorise and tag them such
| that you can filter out all those that you are not interested in,
| such as #HTMLtemplates or #crypto or #AI
| rajivayyangar wrote:
| (I'm the CEO of Product Hunt) This isn't far off the mark, but I
| do want to push back on two things.
|
| One: "VC backed companies have the funds to be able to boost
| their launch on PH to guarantee their launch will be in the top
| 5." - absolutely not. We do not tolerate paying for votes or
| other means of artificially boosting score.
|
| Two: "its going to be a lot harder for you, the side hustler, the
| soloprenuer, the full time bootstrapper" - It's true that the bar
| is higher, but it's because _The Market_ is more competitive. It
| was a personal goal of mine when I stepped in a year ago to make
| Product Hunt into a place where you can launch your side projects
| and they can rise to the top. To do that, we need to reduce the
| noise a bit and ensure that community and organic signal are
| balanced. This is difficult, but we 're working on it. For
| example, Chris Van Pelt's side project OpenUI (open source v0)
| was #2 of the day a little while ago - hunted by a friend without
| any launch prep.
|
| Product Hunt changed my life - I launched a side project that got
| tons of traction and it caused me and my friends to jump in full-
| time and start a company. I want to make Product Hunt an even
| stronger force for changing lives than it's been in the past, but
| that requires evolving the platform for the market in 2024.
| bastawhiz wrote:
| What percentage of "featured" products each day are indie side
| projects?
| padseeker wrote:
| I appreciate your comment, and the honesty.
|
| This post is certainly being critical, but I'm also not here to
| bring the hammer down. I am saying that it has grown very
| popular, and that makes it harder to get noticed. I know more
| than a few people have publicly complained on twitter about how
| their startup listing has been removed or bumped.
|
| I also know there are a lot of scammers out there that PH has
| to battle against, trying to game the system. I know the people
| at G2.com when they started and were giving away free ipads for
| the top people with the most software reviews in a month, and
| someone tried to jump ahead by downvoting all the reviews of
| the people ahead of them in a month.
|
| Clearly though expectations have changed. I'm certainly bummed
| for the 60% of the staff who were laid off. You can't just
| share your startup without some serious work beforehand or else
| you risk blowing your shot at 15 minutes of startup internet
| fame.
|
| My point is not that PH is dying or not, but the game has
| changed and it has hurt makers who do this for the hope of
| making a full time living, and we're being crowded out by VC
| funded startups and previous PH launchers who have had past
| success (i.e. Tallyforms) that are "relaunching" and sucking up
| the little amount of attention available on PH. It's
| frustrating.
| elawler24 wrote:
| Thank you for trying to take on this problem, it's really bad
| though. I did a PH launch this summer resulting in a few
| hundred unique website views. Comments besides people I already
| knew were either bots or promotional. Lots of bounty hunters.
|
| Compare that to our HN post requiring no additional lift, which
| resulted in ~10k unique visitors, no bots, and great critical
| feedback we couldn't get anywhere else.
|
| I do want an authentic PH! But it feels like a vanity landing
| page in its current state.
| throwawayha wrote:
| The next version of PH is likely being built now and be the
| next curve of growth the existing one hasn't done yet.
| AndrewKemendo wrote:
| PH isn't, and (hopefully) won't ever have the gravity of a HN
| front page
|
| I thought PH was great when they came out and Ryan was a
| super nice guy - gave my startup a small boost when PH just
| came out
|
| Reality is there was never a business there in any real way
| that was sustainable and not subject to enshittification, so
| I'm not sure what's surprising
| throwawayha wrote:
| Becoming a platform for experts vs beginners is a key
| consideration.
| throwawayha wrote:
| What does top 5 convey anyways? Temporary Signal? Status?
| Badge?
|
| Likely not a ton of signups or paid users.
| swyx wrote:
| > We do not tolerate paying for votes or other means of
| artificially boosting score.
|
| i have been recipient of many many many many many many DMs from
| startups asking for upvotes at 12.01am PT. this erased whatever
| respect i had left for PH. when you make this pointless is when
| i will pay attention to it again.
| andrewstuart wrote:
| As suggested in my comment below it should accumulate the
| launch posts for 24 hours then publish all in a big
| randomized list. Makes no sense that the time you post is a
| factor in the process.
| joshdavham wrote:
| Any reason you don't want to take a crack at building another
| product hunt? You've identified the problem, you have opinions
| and clearly care about this stuff. What's holding you back?
| minimaxir wrote:
| "Let's see _you_ do better " isn't a counterargument.
|
| The better conclusion (supported by the CEO's response in this
| thread) is that there may not be a clear reason for Product
| Hunt-type site to exist in 2024.
| joshdavham wrote:
| This was not a counter argument. Just a question.
| rpgbr wrote:
| Honestly, what really disappoints is how PH is easy to be
| dominated by questionable trends -- once it was NFTs, then web3,
| nowadays it's hard to find a non-AI popular product over there.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| I don't know what was ever cool about it. Product Hunt might put
| your product in front of Product Hunt enthusiasts but putting it
| front of your customers is priceless.
| the_clarence wrote:
| As a user I thought it was fantastic in its beginnings, and then
| I just grew tired of looking at a pletaura of new products and
| new apps every day. I suspect noone needs that frequency of
| product updates unless they're addicted to product updates. I'd
| rather read HN or twitter and get a bag of diverse news from the
| people I follow who will organically amplify cool things.
| SmellTheGlove wrote:
| I still don't understand what the purpose of product hunt is. Who
| is the audience and what does a founder concretely gain from
| launching on PH?
| PaulHoule wrote:
| It's a delusion and has always been a delusion.
|
| Marketing is hard work, you have to identify who the target
| customer is and try to get inside their head. Whether you are
| trying for paid advertising or organic SEO or a bombastic
| pseudo-event like
|
| https://actiondrivenpodcast.com/salesforce-vs-siebel-protest...
|
| it takes some combination of money, time, energy, elbow grease
| and creativity. Product Hunt offers a chance to bypass all
| that. It's particularly seductive to the independent creator
| who hopes that can bypass the hard work of marketing
| altogether. (I am thinking right now of a friend who plans to
| post thousands of videos to Tik Tok without any marketing
| effort...)
|
| The problem is not that it is hard to get on the front page,
| the problem is that there is no pot of gold at the end of that
| rainbow at all, not for a business which isn't aimed squarely
| at the center of the crowd that wakes up and checks Product
| Hunt every morning (an app that promises you'll frontpage PH?
| PH 2.0?)
| spirobelv2 wrote:
| product hunt seems like a great place to explain your product in
| detail to your competition.
|
| how many potential real users frequent this site?
|
| it seems like the primary audience is people that are trying to
| do what your are doing.
| dorian-graph wrote:
| The comments sections have had the same vibe and usefulness as
| LinkedIn influencers and grifters for a couple of years now.
| charlie0 wrote:
| The issue with not charging is spam. To avoid it, you need some
| kind of moderation mechanism or review system. Both of these have
| trade-offs which require some form of active management to avoid
| gaming, which isn't free.
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