[HN Gopher] Product Hunt is dead
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Product Hunt is dead
Author : mhashemi
Score : 240 points
Date : 2025-09-24 16:23 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (sedimental.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (sedimental.org)
| mhashemi wrote:
| Or zombified at least. Here's the meat:
| https://sedimental.org/product_hunt_is_dead.html#the-zombie-...
| slater wrote:
| You linked to the same thing twice?
| mhashemi wrote:
| ah, meant to link straight to the receipts. fixed, thanks!
| brentm wrote:
| I feel like it died in about 2015.
| maccard wrote:
| Has Product Hunt ever been anything other than grift?
| thebeardisred wrote:
| I never understood the appeal in the first place.
| edoceo wrote:
| I like the duck.
| mhashemi wrote:
| Thanks! Pro-Duck Hunt. It's right there, not sure how they
| missed it.
| gkoberger wrote:
| I won a Product Hunt hackathon in ~2015 by making a Produck
| Hunt game (where you used your phone like the gun):
| https://www.producthunt.com/products/produck-
| hunt/launches/p...
| mhashemi wrote:
| And they're still sticking to the kitty 10 years later?
| There are kids launching apps born after the extinction of
| Google Glass.
| electric_muse wrote:
| I feel this.
|
| 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.
|
| We ended in 9th place or something.
|
| Never again. I realized it's just pay to play.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| Also Product Hunt is no substitute for a marketing plan but for
| a large number of people it is.
| garymiklos wrote:
| "all the traffic goes to those apps" - that was true in 2022
| but now just there is not any traffic. In 2022 i ranked 14th
| with my product and got about 250 visitors. 1 month ago my
| friend ranked 7th and got about 50...
| Aurornis wrote:
| Product Hunt launches have been gamed ever since it gained some
| notoriety. If your product team wasn't coordinating with all of
| their friends and family to create accounts ahead of time and
| seed them with some fake activity before they all upvoted on
| launch day in exchange for a gift card, you weren't going
| toward the top.
| xwowsersx wrote:
| 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.
| tchock23 wrote:
| All you have to do is look at the minuscule number views on any
| YouTube video links shared with a new product on PH.
|
| 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?
| mhashemi wrote:
| Exactly. The PH docs make a big deal about having a video demo,
| too. Then they go ahead and hand-pick launches to feature that
| don't even meet that criterion. And for what?
| reactordev wrote:
| For returns on investment
| derefr wrote:
| > One would think if there was real interest someone would
| click to watch a video?
|
| If a third-party product PR fluff-piece gets me interested in a
| product, I click over to the product's own site (and maybe
| watch a first-party video, if available.) I trust the product's
| vendor to understand and explain the product's USP a lot better
| than some third-party marketing agency will.
| iamleppert wrote:
| They offer YouTube views on any video for $50 per 1,000 views
| as part of the Product Hunt upvote package.
|
| You can easily decide to purchase the views at the time of
| purchase of the Product Hunt upvote package.
| trilogic wrote:
| I am wondering why?
|
| 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.
| slater wrote:
| What's this in reference to...?
| trilogic wrote:
| Well well downvoted again, I am laughing it out :))
|
| >What's this in reference to...? To me personally and many
| others stating the facts in different forums how their
| account got closed when they got popular. People wont let it
| go so easy, they worked hard. You either don't accept an
| account since the beginning or once accepted can't be closed
| later because becoming popular, nonsense. I know this will be
| downvoted and sent to the bottom as always but Producthunt,
| Google, Youtube are history (the new blockbuster). I will
| never use them again personally (even if they pay me), and so
| are doing all the others.
| alpha_trion wrote:
| It's just been grift for a long time.
| fcpguru wrote:
| https://launchdirectories.com/
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44668574
| mhashemi wrote:
| Woooow, there are so many! Impressive list, but do any of them
| work?
| fcpguru wrote:
| hehe not really. But I did find https://peerlist.io/ from
| that list. And it's a nice community.
| kilroy123 wrote:
| Aren't all these directories just paid for links? Like, who is
| actually browsing all these looking for tools?
| jshchnz wrote:
| It's been dead a loooong time
| sevensor wrote:
| Was it ever alive? I never understood the premise. It's for,
| what, people who feel they don't spend enough money and are
| looking for new things to subscribe to? Is that a big market?
| alberth wrote:
| 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.
|
| Maybe I wrongly assumed all these years.
|
| https://techcrunch.com/2014/10/08/product-hunt-gets-6-1-mill...
| mhashemi wrote:
| Well, it's not a bad thesis in 2014. They seem to have had a
| pretty big hand in killing their baby in 2022, by bundling it
| with a crypto startup with a URL that already fails to DNS
| resolve <3 years later:
| https://a16z.com/announcement/investing-in-prologue/
| pavlov wrote:
| "Web3 is the next big leap for computing" in the first
| paragraph is a giveaway for a post that was written in that
| short window between Covid and the FTX collapse.
|
| The shitcoins are still with us, but at least nobody pretends
| they're going to be used for anything except things like
| bribing the president.
| sam1234apter wrote:
| It's a tough day for Product Hunt fans. Luckily, I'm here to
| finish the job and perform the post-mortem with SubmitHunt.com
| renewiltord wrote:
| 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.
| arthurofbabylon wrote:
| That duck is the poetic epitome of Product Hunt. Sadly, and
| descriptively.
| pluc wrote:
| 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.
| xnx wrote:
| 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.
| mhashemi wrote:
| AlternativeTo is full of SaaS apps! If you're not finding one,
| you should join and add it :)
| xnx wrote:
| Thanks! I'll check that out. Didn't know if there was some
| other site that was more popular than AlternativeTo for
| Saas/web-apps.
| cb33 wrote:
| You're looking for an alternative to AlternativeTo
| xnx wrote:
| Ha! https://alternativeto.net/software/alternativeto/
| fragmede wrote:
| Just don't search for AlternativeTo on alternativeto.net,
| this will break the Internet!
| yoyomamayoyo wrote:
| ProductHunt may be dead, but prestigehunt lives on!
| busymom0 wrote:
| > And it's predatory to foster a "community" where clout peddlers
| can predate on a
|
| The sentence is missing the ending.
| PTOB wrote:
| Here's the rest of it: > ... well-constructed sentence.
| rchaud wrote:
| 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.
| mhashemi wrote:
| Yes, DIT is dead on. Though not completely for free. Front page
| is gonna cost ya $100-200.
| brap wrote:
| It's not just PH, it's that entire subculture of "founders" or
| whatever you want to call it, that is just 99% fake and sucks
| balls.
|
| <rocket emoji>
| coreyo wrote:
| It seriously lacked what discussion happens in a Product Review
| or Design Review internally (ideally) at a company.
| siva7 wrote:
| 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).
| gitmagic wrote:
| This. I got more spam than actual users when I launched on
| Product Hunt. Pretty sure majority of people on PH are just
| there to promote their own services and products.
| cjs_ac wrote:
| If I have a problem and want to buy a solution to that problem,
| I'll use a search engine to find what solutions are available.
| I won't check a list of new solutions to problems on a daily
| basis in the hope that one day a solution to my problem will be
| on there.
|
| Product Hunt is the tech founder equivalent of refreshing your
| social media profile, watching the like count increase on your
| latest selfie.
| ahmedfromtunis wrote:
| I used to enjoy browsing PH and learn about all the cool
| projects people were building. And there were actually very
| good ideas -- at least in the early days of the community.
|
| I even used to play a game that I've called PH-roulette: I'd
| open the top 10 or so products in separate tabs without
| reading their taglines. I then try to guess what they do
| based on the copy of landing page.
|
| On most days, only one or 2 products had clear descriptions
| that are actually useful.
|
| I started playing this game out of boredom but ended up
| learning a lot about what _not_ to do while building my own
| landing pages.
| piker wrote:
| I think that's right in the first order, but the second order
| is that journalists and gadget enthusiasts do, and they may
| write about your product. That happened to me with my Show HN
| post on here.
| allenu wrote:
| Agreed. I think it's worth posting on it but the right
| attitude is just treat it as any other outlet to post your
| product. Don't fret too much about it or spend too much time
| prepping and trying to game the timing.
|
| When I've posted projects on there, I found so many bots
| commenting and then later got several emails from people
| wanting to "help" me with upvoting for a fee, it made me
| realize how fake it was.
| Aurornis wrote:
| Product Hunt turned into a meta-game long ago. Getting
| attention on Product Hunt is more about collecting a metric for
| your Product Manager resume these days.
|
| There is an anti-pattern in Product Management where some PMs
| want to build the product launch around making a big splash on
| Product Hunt. Anyone who knows the drill won't allow this and
| will instead do what's best for finding customers, but I've
| seen some naive startups get pulled into chasing the Product
| Hunt launch follows by disappointment when the Product Hunt
| launch signup cohort has the worst retention rate of any of
| their signups.
| boltzmann-brain wrote:
| what is the play those PMs go for, and how does one recognize
| it?
| AznHisoka wrote:
| You wont, at least not directly. But indirectly it can help
| downstream. I still know investors who browse it every once in
| awhile looking for interesting products. ChatGPT has also cited
| a few products in PH lists to me too. So no you wont find users
| but it aint useless either
| tmaly wrote:
| What do people use now?
| aranw wrote:
| This gave me one of those surreal "huh" moments I've had in
| awhile. I've seen loads of apps boasting about being "#1 on
| Product Hunt" or whatever and I just realised that I've never
| actually gone to Product Hunt looking for a product to use.
| Does make you wonder who Product Hunts audience really is and
| who is doing all the upvoting?
| mcintyre1994 wrote:
| When there were a lot of indiehacker people active on
| Twitter, a lot of them seemed to talk a lot about using
| Product Hunt, but I think they were just helping their
| friends out when one of them posted there.
| turnsout wrote:
| The audience is almost literally no one, the people doing the
| upvoting are doing it for subhuman wages in developing
| countries, and the only scrap of value created is a "#1 on
| Product Hunt" badge that doesn't even impress developers
| anymore, let alone your users.
|
| I launched on PH last year and came to the same conclusion as
| the author of the post. The platform is dead, and deserves to
| stay dead.
| pembrook wrote:
| 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.
| asadm wrote:
| 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).
| garymiklos wrote:
| yeah, only if you target only devs
| minimaxir wrote:
| 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.
| siva7 wrote:
| It's a really weird time we're living in now. I could at least
| tell 10 years ago a launch would get often times buzz primarily
| because of the quality of the product. Nowadays the coin has
| flipped - the buzz is usually about anything else but the
| actual product.
| dustywusty wrote:
| I couldn't imagine a better way to describe the current concept
| of grassroots marketing. Spam, and frankly heavy-handed and bad
| ways to resolve it (no links get traction, etc) have
| effectively closed the door here.
|
| Anti-spam teams for a lot of social companies are under the
| umbrella of customer experience, and considered a cost center.
| The goal quickly becomes: be a hammer.
|
| The impact to user experience, specifically around casual
| discovery has been profound.
| sandGorgon wrote:
| totally this.
|
| 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.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| Oh it's just pretending to be dead to get attention.
|
| See??? Now everybody's talking about it again, after it was so
| long forgotten.
|
| Don't fall for it!
| moomoo11 wrote:
| I always associated product hunt with low quality and usually
| throwaway/zero moat type stuff. Maybe I'm wrong.
| designwhine wrote:
| More often than not there are interesting finds on Product Hunt
| but nothing that's really valuable
| tonymet wrote:
| It's another signal of growing internet balkanization trend as
| online communities pivot to being more exclusive to mirror real-
| world communities. Once the A.I. farms take over, people flee.
|
| Public forums - group chats, Yelp - Beli , Twitter - X / Bluesky
| / Gab / Rumble , IG Posts - DMs + Stories, FB Newsfeed - Groups
|
| Product Hunt - Discord, AI-rugpull bots, TBD?
| tanin wrote:
| At this point, PH is more for SEO because, once you hit the top,
| tons of other websites will link to your product.
|
| FinFam looks amazing. It's an interesting take on personal
| finance because I never really have a view of my own net worth.
| And, because of that, I have been having a feeling for a while
| that it causes me to be "too frugal" most of the times.
| mhashemi wrote:
| Yep, from a founder's perspective PH is mostly an SEO thing.
| I'm not sure if it's the _best_ SEO thing, but I guess that's
| part of being a first-time founder!
|
| Re: feeling too frugal, my friends came up with a name for it,
| "poor man brain" lol. I talk a little about it here:
| https://sedimental.org/announcing_finfam.html
| tanin wrote:
| Yeah, I think a lot of people who break into tech have a bit
| of a struggle to adjust to a high TC. I still remember back
| in the days having a convo about how Subway offered $8 for a
| foot long and we could eat it for both lunch and dinner
| during weekend... such a good deal. Meanwhile the company we
| were at was going IPO. Good old days lol.
| dustywusty wrote:
| The backlinks derived from PH are generally considered harmful,
| and rightfully so. It's gamed beyond belief. There is not much
| to gain from being at the top of PH other than talking about it
| to legacy VCs.
| superasn wrote:
| I agree with this take, Product Hunt felt like it was chasing
| short term goals instead of building something sustainable They
| also allowed and sometimes encouraged behavior that undermined
| the quality of the site
|
| The last time I used it one of the common hacks was adding 50
| makers to a single app launch PH also openly condoned mass email
| blasts and tweets to drive votes which just rewarded whoever
| could push the hardest on promotion
|
| In contrast Hacker News discourages asking people for upvotes and
| even treats it as a negative if you do That longterm focus on
| signal over hype is probably why HN still feels useful today
| while PH lost its way
| bdcravens wrote:
| If you had told me Product Hunt was actually dead, I wouldn't
| know if the top of my head if you were telling the truth. I
| haven't paid attention to it in 6 or 7 years. At one point, I'd
| visit to find something new, useful, or cool. Over time I started
| seeing little more than tiny iterations on the trend of the
| moment, and never really found anything worth visiting.
| wiradikusuma wrote:
| Launching is hard. I put my own side project on HN
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45345623 a few days ago and
| it got exactly zero traction. At first it stung, but then I
| checked https://news.ycombinator.com/shownew and realized:
| someone launches something literally every few minutes. The odds
| are just stacked.
|
| Whether it's Product Hunt, HN, or even LinkedIn (I actually saw
| better response there lol), it feels like everyone's throwing
| spaghetti at the same wall at the same time. Pre-internet, that
| spaghetti was launch parties and press releases. Same energy,
| same lottery odds.
|
| What seems to work better is launching to people who already know
| you (e.g. your list), who have the problem you're solving, and
| are actually waiting for your product. Everything else is just
| noise.
| epolanski wrote:
| Wow I didn't expect show new to have such high numbers.
|
| But what are you gonna do? Some very impactful projects and
| startups opened posts here and got 0 traction.
| karolcodes wrote:
| where should i launch my product then?
| mhashemi wrote:
| Show HN! Or, another commenter mentioned peerlist. But the real
| answer is (from the post): wherever your customers are.
| Jonovono wrote:
| I used to check Product Hunt daily. I would literally visit every
| link, bookmark them etc. I had actually completely forgot it
| existed until this post. It has to be years since I have visited.
| h1fra wrote:
| Take the seo, but don't waste any time with PH (or any other
| alternatives)
| smjburton wrote:
| Agreed OP. I could see ProductHunt being a place for product-
| oriented people and founders to form a community and collaborate
| (constructive feedback, partnerships, etc). Sadly, most of the
| activity there lately seems to be people quickly creating
| accounts, launching their vibe-coded app, and then moving on.
| I've stopped visiting regularly until the maintainers make
| improvements to foster more of a community and bring people back
| to the site.
| stevage wrote:
| A thing I find odd about Product Hunt is that I have only ever
| heard about it in the context of founders launching, through HN.
| I've never read anything from a user's perspective, no "I found
| this cool thing on Product Hunt" posts.
|
| Do people really go there to just discover what other random new
| site launched today? Do people actually crave yet more new apps?
| fbxio wrote:
| This confirms what I believed for years. PH suffers from a
| fundamentally flawed incentive system that, by game theory,
| inevitably triggers a race to the bottom, forcing participants to
| cheat. Because if some cheat and you don't, then you don't rank.
| Cheating became a must.
|
| The mechanism in which founders were indirectly forced by the
| platform's reward system to spam and beg their networks for votes
| was surely great for PH's traction, but the collapse was
| inevitable as it didn't drive lasting value for platform
| participants.
|
| The core idea that the products that rank high are those worth
| your attention only works if votes aren't biased or manipulated.
|
| So any alternative would need to get the incentive systems right
| so that actions are aligned with genuine discovery and long-term
| value creation, not short-term vote gaming.
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(page generated 2025-09-24 23:01 UTC)