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How Product Hunt really works

(medium.com)
695 points brw12 | 2 comments | 15 Dec 15 19:32 UTC | HN request time: 0s | 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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1. eterm ◴[15 Dec 15 22:08 UTC] No.10740848[source]▶
If you look at HN ranking trackers then you'll see there are definitely artificial adjustments to the rankings of articles. Mostly that is downwards but sometimes upwards too.

HN is mostly fair, but don't trick yourself into believing it is completely fair.

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2. venning ◴[15 Dec 15 22:16 UTC] No.10740877[source]▶
There are factors beyond naive weightings, as well. I remember reading somewhere that if a thread becomes too heated or turns into a flamewar, the mods have the ability to suppress it in the rankings artificially to let it cool off. That functionality makes sense, but wouldn't be easily identified in a third-party tracker.

A lot of comments here seem to be assigning moderation as bias.