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)

HN is equally rigged. The mods regularly change headlines, remove posts, and allow YC companies to post on the front page.

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.

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...

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.