How Product Hunt really works

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)

FWIW, HN is implicitly biased towards YC companies, because posts by YC founders show up in a different color to other YC founders, which is an implicit voting ring of sorts.

This may no longer be the case; it was the case a few years ago to my knowledge.

YC alumni see each other's usernames in orange. That plus the job post on the front page are the two YC-specific things that HN has. Both have been in place for a long time, and moderators try to be meticulous about not giving special treatment beyond that. (I say "try to be" because no one is the best judge of their own biases. But we do try hard, sometimes to the point of overcompensating.)

I don't think the colored usernames affect voting ring activity much. YC alumni and startups certainly are not exempt from the penalties we put on such activity, and frequently get hit by them. The first thing we always tell YC founders is not to solicit upvotes for posts because that backfires.

Even if there is no upvote requesting, this does bias YC founders to upvote other founders' posts, when they organically check the front page.