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...

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?

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.

> PH presents as egalitarian and meritocratic, but that's clearly horseshit.

From my experiences, Product Hunt is largely a byproduct of a greater scene in which this is very often the case. It is one of the things I dislike most about Silicon Valley, and is something I have tried hard to make sure I can avoid in some way or another. I have been better or worse at it at different times.

There appears to be a strong component of success-by-networking in the tech industry that I have tried to opt out of, largely because I am afraid that if I get too deep into the networking games, I will begin to lose an objective sense of what I can accomplish technically, and no longer be able to personally calibrate for myself whether or not my work can stand successfully on its own. I bought into a lot of the rhetoric of the endless meritocracy early on, and found the wizard behind the curtain is still often based upon the ol' boys club. Deciding to take this approach has probably hurt my career as a developer in many ways.

This type of stuff is why I have been afraid for years to contribute to sites like Hacker News, even though I have been lurking on this site for five or six years. It's a weird situation for an introvert, to want to be able to contribute to a community I have extracted so much value from, in hopes of adding some back to it in whatever way I can, but also being somewhat terrified of getting absorbed into the echo chamber.