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How Product Hunt really works

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695 points brw12 | 2 comments | 15 Dec 15 19:32 UTC | HN request time: 0.62s | source
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birken ◴[15 Dec 15 21:14 UTC] No.10740521[source]▶
Hacker News is a long-running, open, inclusive startup community that is subsidized by a related business, doesn't sell anything, and has proven time and again to do things good for the entire startup community.

Product Hunt is a new, closed, exclusive startup community run by a for-profit company that will eventually have to start selling you something.

Not sure why people complain about PH so much... just don't use it. There already is a perfectly good community of startup people out there that has much more incentive to stay "pure" than a for-profit one. Sure, HN isn't perfect, but fundamentally it is always going to be better than any for-profit communities.

(And also this obligatory comment: If you want to build a successful company, stop wasting your time browsing startup communities and spend your time talking with users and building your product)

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jl87 ◴[15 Dec 15 21:18 UTC] No.10740547[source]▶
HN is equally rigged. The mods regularly change headlines, remove posts, and allow YC companies to post on the front page.
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minimaxir ◴[15 Dec 15 21:25 UTC] No.10740598[source]▶
1. Headlines are changed to match the article verbatim, or if the article is linkbait, the title is changed to nonlinkbait (the latter might be more frequent case from your submission history)

2. Again, users flag. Rarely moderators remove posts other than that.

3. Those are job ads, which have a set decay time and always start at #6.

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gearoidoc ◴[15 Dec 15 21:30 UTC] No.10740623[source]▶
I think you're off on 2 and 3 - although I only have anecdata to make me believe so.

On point 2: I've often found posts which are gaining traction on the homepage which do not subscribe to the 'scale fast'-centric belief system of YC are pulled. Most recently this one by DHH:

https://signalvnoise.com/posts/3972-reconsider

3. They're not all job ads. Stripe updates their API and it goes straight to #1? Come on...

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minimaxir ◴[15 Dec 15 21:38 UTC] No.10740660[source]▶
2. Er, the Medium version of that article got 906 points: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10506422

3. Stripe is a rather large company that happens to be a YC company. Keep in mind that Product Hunt is YC too and you're commenting on a negative article about it currently ranked at #4 on the front page.

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1. gearoidoc ◴[15 Dec 15 21:49 UTC] No.10740740[source]▶
2. I don't see what its performance on Medium has to do with it. My point is that it was a perfectly good article pulled from the front page.

3. There are plenty of rather large companies that don't get as much attention here as Stripe does (I don't have anything against Stripe btw, just using them as an example in this case).

If HN pulled this article it would be pretty damning on the part of YC. The placement of this article in question does not disprove my previous points.

FWIW, I've enjoyed relatively decent success from my own product launches on HN.

EDIT: re: medium - I mistook you the first time. Apologies. My point still stands re: posts being pulled.

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2. girvo ◴[15 Dec 15 23:15 UTC] No.10741186[source]▶
> 2. I don't see what its performance on Medium has to do with it. My point is that it was a perfectly good article pulled from the front page.

Oh come on now, you've been here long enough to know that HN attempts to avoid duplicates within days of each other. Of course that one was pulled when the other post of the same content had a huge upvote count and lively discussion.