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How Product Hunt really works

(medium.com)
695 points brw12 | 1 comments | 15 Dec 15 19:32 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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phantom_oracle ◴[15 Dec 15 21:43 UTC] No.10740690[source]▶
Nothing can hurt a well-meaning first-time founder of some useful side-project business then to learn that a non-entity like Product Hunt is a rigged game where the inner circle are simply gaming the system for their friends and people whom they benefit from and will benefit.

From "top 3% of coders" to "your product will get 1st spot if you scratch our back with a small slice of the pie or counter-promote our product with yours" to "we will only invest in you if you get referred through an acquittance of ours", the game surely does feel more rigged each day.

The upper echelons of tech sure does share more similarities with high-finance then they would like to admit...

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Bjartr ◴[15 Dec 15 21:53 UTC] No.10740756[source]▶
Does it feel more rigged because it is becoming more rigged or because the level of rigging that already exists in the ecosystem is becoming more visible?
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l33tbro ◴[15 Dec 15 22:22 UTC] No.10740916[source]▶
It's pure deception. PH presents as egalitarian and meritocratic, but that's clearly horseshit. We need the right person to build a more transparent and credible alternative. They've straight-up lost me as a daily visitor.
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1. balladeer ◴[16 Dec 15 01:28 UTC] No.10741767[source]▶
This post makes sense to me in a way that I half understood earlier. What I mean is, I would see the front page apps/services and they would be mediocre a lot of times and then I would compare these front page listings to what I used to see earlier and I would find that the trend is changing. Also, not always the top listing was mediocre, sometimes it was, sometimes it wasn't. There are other such venues and many a times I would find same products listed there too and the their relative rankings would be very different. I never paid too much attention though.

Then they have this - very few people can vote or comment, others can just visit their sites even though they are willing to login via Twitter and in fact do login via Twitter. It is like a walled garden, or a house where you can take a peek but can't choose the window, or the perspective. It felt like they feed information to the visitors (their audience I mean - me, us) and the visitors are supposed to take everything at a face value.

It will be worse (kind of it already is) when PH becomes a very mainstream player of product launches.