How Product Hunt really works

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...

> "The upper echelons of tech"

Product Hunt is not the upper echolons of tech. It's a spam site who's founders have in the past have engaged in plenty of questionable behavior, including spamming founders of yc companies with "someone's left a comment on your product, you should respond!" emails when it was a Product Hunt employee leaving those comments in the first place.

Product Hunt is just an online catalog. I've never found it to be useful. It's basically where hackers and founders go to circle jerk each other and hope to get noticed, self declared early adopters can feel important about themselves, and more established goons get prominent placement.

It's rare, but there are some pretty shady types that get through YC. They usually focus more on "growth hacking" than actually building a useful product. Product Hunt fits right in there.