8 ms·

Product Hunt isn't dying, it's becoming gentrified

102 points by padseeker 2y ago

ado__dev 2y ago
Product Hunt exists to make Product Hunt money and not promote your business. If you look at it through that lens, it makes perfect sense what is going on there.
- _pdp_ 2y ago
  The only reason Product Hunt exists is because others use it to promote their business. ;) making money from all of this is simply a side-effect of the value add.
  - bdcravens 2y ago
    You could say that about any advertising product, none of which are necessarily altruistic.
snapcaster 2y ago
I don't know anything about product hunt or the people discussed, but it is infuriating when a product person doesn't know the product. I'm happy to work at company currently where the product org is very competent and are "power users" of the products. I think it makes a HUGE difference
dbreunig 2y ago
I launched an app on Product Hunt several months ago. I found the exercise of listing the app and creating the content for the listing a worthwhile exercise, but nothing else about the experience worthwhile. Every day its listings are filled with redundant apps, template shovelware, wrappers around AI APIs, and random non-app content (think ebooks, blog posts, courses, etc.) Very occasionally you'll find a useful utility or two by a independent team (but you gotta scroll wayyy down). PH has completely failed to defend their ranking algorithms against spam and brigading.
gkoberger 2y ago
This is based on a very misleading typo. On Sept 25, Jason tweeted that the CTO (not CEO, as this article states) didn't know who levelsio is. In October, the CEO wrote about levelsio, so he does indeed know who he is. (https://www.linkedin.com/posts/rajiv-ayyangar_why-doesnt-product-hunt-have-a-separate-activity-7236402552198565890-vBI4/ https://www.linkedin.com/posts/rajiv-ayyangar_why-doesnt-pro...) Assuming it's true, I don't know if the CTO really needs to know who levelsio is. The CEO does, but does the CTO?
- padseeker 2y ago
  I made a mistake, it will be corrected asap. Thanks for the heads up.
  - gkoberger 2y ago
    Doesn't it undermine your whole point, though? Your most damning point was at best a typo and at worst a fictional story. Like, don't you think the head of growth might have an incentive to cause the issues you're mentioning? Doesn't the CEO implying the story isn't true give you pause? Did you look at the head of growth's LinkedIn? Did nothing about their resume (which I won't post here) give you pause before writing a whole post? I agree Product Hunt is different than it was years ago. So is the entire startup ecosystem. But this article just came off as sour grapes, where you cherry-picked stories to try to make an argument.
    - padseeker 2y ago
      Are you saying that the one letter typo on the one of my many points surrounding the drama at Product Hunt discredit the whole thing? No I do not. Maybe I should have shared in the article all the twitter posts where indie hackers are upset how they are getting screwed and how hard it is to get ranked on PH. There is a lot more drama surrounding PH than just the CTO not knowing one well known community member.
      - gkoberger 2y ago
skmurphy 2y ago
Key points: 1. There are many to launch but most of the sites don’t have the community or credibility that PH seems to have lost. 2. If you want what PH was 3-4 years ago you have to go somewhere else. 3. If you want to build the new Product Hunt you can’t just create a site where people can submit their product and launch. You need affordances that cultivate community. 4. Once you get traction you should expect some members will game your system: successful systems always attract parasites.
- skmurphy 2y ago
  I think these two articles are relevant for #4 https://gwern.net/doc/technology/2005-shirky-agroupisitsownworstenemy.pdf https://gwern.net/doc/technology/2005-shirky-agroupisitsownw... https://www.skmurphy.com/blog/2014/09/15/guidelines-for-an-online-community-of-entrepreneurs/ https://www.skmurphy.com/blog/2014/09/15/guidelines-for-an-o...
- PaulHoule 2y ago
  I don’t believe in the value of the Product Hunt “community”. The point of marketing is to get your product in front of customers, not to get it front of members of a community of deadbeat marketers who think they’re doing their job when they get their product in front of non-customers. If your product is “one weird trick” to get your product on the top of Product Hunt that’s appropriate for Product Hunt, but that’s about it.
  - minimaxir 2y ago
    > The point of marketing is to get your product in front of customers, not to get it front of members of a community of deadbeat marketers But what if the customers are deadbeat marketers?
    - PaulHoule 2y ago
      If they're not willing to put in the elbow grease I don't think most of them will want to spend much money.
  - 2y ago
ryandrake 2y ago
Any "Ranking of X" or "Curated List of Y" becomes useless and untrustworthy as soon as a cottage industry springs up around it where people can pay to boost their ranking or get on the lists. SEO, Amazon ratings, YouTube recommendations, even meatspace things like college rankings. This seems like The Big Problem that recommendation / discovery sites have been failing to solve for decades.
- lovethevoid 2y ago
  They haven't been failing to solve it, that's what they're explicitly optimizing for.
andrewstuart 2y ago
Maybe all sites aimed at indie developers become a spammy sleaze district given time and it’s necessary for a new site to arise where initially only the techy developer entrepreneurs hang until the sleaze follows and the cycle repeats. I’ve been reading that the same thing has happened to indie hackers.
minimaxir 2y ago
"Becoming" gentrified? Product Hunt's value proposition since the beginning was to launder credibility from "friends"/VCs promoting apps without having to disclose conflicts of interests. It never was fair to indie creators and able to fulfill its stated purpose of surfacing the best products.
andrewstuart 2y ago
If you are coming up with the”next product hunt”, please ensure the list of launched companies is one straight list of all the companies in random order. It’s never made sense that PH shows only a selection of the launches and you need to click to see them all … that’s fundamentally unfair. Also, there should be no new launches to be added to the list - it should accumulate launches for the past 24 hours hidden and then launch them all simultaneously - the time that a product as added to the list in the past 24 hours should not be a factor in how many upvotes it gets. Related, it should not be important to launch at 12:00PM pacific time or whatever it is - makes no sense. Maybe there should be AI trained to categorise and tag them such that you can filter out all those that you are not interested in, such as #HTMLtemplates or #crypto or #AI
rajivayyangar 2y ago
(I'm the CEO of Product Hunt) This isn't far off the mark, but I do want to push back on two things. One: "VC backed companies have the funds to be able to boost their launch on PH to guarantee their launch will be in the top 5." - absolutely not. We do not tolerate paying for votes or other means of artificially boosting score. Two: "its going to be a lot harder for you, the side hustler, the soloprenuer, the full time bootstrapper" - It's true that the bar is higher, but it's because The Market is more competitive. It was a personal goal of mine when I stepped in a year ago to make Product Hunt into a place where you can launch your side projects and they can rise to the top. To do that, we need to reduce the noise a bit and ensure that community and organic signal are balanced. This is difficult, but we're working on it. For example, Chris Van Pelt's side project OpenUI (open source v0) was #2 of the day a little while ago - hunted by a friend without any launch prep. Product Hunt changed my life - I launched a side project that got tons of traction and it caused me and my friends to jump in full-time and start a company. I want to make Product Hunt an even stronger force for changing lives than it's been in the past, but that requires evolving the platform for the market in 2024.
- bastawhiz 2y ago
  What percentage of "featured" products each day are indie side projects?
- padseeker 2y ago
  I appreciate your comment, and the honesty. This post is certainly being critical, but I'm also not here to bring the hammer down. I am saying that it has grown very popular, and that makes it harder to get noticed. I know more than a few people have publicly complained on twitter about how their startup listing has been removed or bumped. I also know there are a lot of scammers out there that PH has to battle against, trying to game the system. I know the people at G2.com when they started and were giving away free ipads for the top people with the most software reviews in a month, and someone tried to jump ahead by downvoting all the reviews of the people ahead of them in a month. Clearly though expectations have changed. I'm certainly bummed for the 60% of the staff who were laid off. You can't just share your startup without some serious work beforehand or else you risk blowing your shot at 15 minutes of startup internet fame. My point is not that PH is dying or not, but the game has changed and it has hurt makers who do this for the hope of making a full time living, and we're being crowded out by VC funded startups and previous PH launchers who have had past success (i.e. Tallyforms) that are "relaunching" and sucking up the little amount of attention available on PH. It's frustrating.
joshdavham 2y ago
Any reason you don’t want to take a crack at building another product hunt? You’ve identified the problem, you have opinions and clearly care about this stuff. What’s holding you back?
- minimaxir 2y ago
  "Let's see you do better" isn't a counterargument. The better conclusion (supported by the CEO's response in this thread) is that there may not be a clear reason for Product Hunt-type site to exist in 2024.
  - joshdavham 2y ago
    This was not a counter argument. Just a question.
rpgbr 2y ago
Honestly, what really disappoints is how PH is easy to be dominated by questionable trends — once it was NFTs, then web3, nowadays it's hard to find a non-AI popular product over there.
PaulHoule 2y ago
I don’t know what was ever cool about it. Product Hunt might put your product in front of Product Hunt enthusiasts but putting it front of your customers is priceless.
the_clarence 2y ago
As a user I thought it was fantastic in its beginnings, and then I just grew tired of looking at a pletaura of new products and new apps every day. I suspect noone needs that frequency of product updates unless they're addicted to product updates. I'd rather read HN or twitter and get a bag of diverse news from the people I follow who will organically amplify cool things.
SmellTheGlove 2y ago
I still don’t understand what the purpose of product hunt is. Who is the audience and what does a founder concretely gain from launching on PH?
- PaulHoule 2y ago
  It’s a delusion and has always been a delusion. Marketing is hard work, you have to identify who the target customer is and try to get inside their head. Whether you are trying for paid advertising or organic SEO or a bombastic pseudo-event like https://actiondrivenpodcast.com/salesforce-vs-siebel-protests/ https://actiondrivenpodcast.com/salesforce-vs-siebel-protest... it takes some combination of money, time, energy, elbow grease and creativity. Product Hunt offers a chance to bypass all that. It’s particularly seductive to the independent creator who hopes that can bypass the hard work of marketing altogether. (I am thinking right now of a friend who plans to post thousands of videos to Tik Tok without any marketing effort…) The problem is not that it is hard to get on the front page, the problem is that there is no pot of gold at the end of that rainbow at all, not for a business which isn’t aimed squarely at the center of the crowd that wakes up and checks Product Hunt every morning (an app that promises you’ll frontpage PH? PH 2.0?)
spirobelv2 2y ago
product hunt seems like a great place to explain your product in detail to your competition. how many potential real users frequent this site? it seems like the primary audience is people that are trying to do what your are doing.
dorian-graph 2y ago
The comments sections have had the same vibe and usefulness as LinkedIn influencers and grifters for a couple of years now.
charlie0 2y ago
The issue with not charging is spam. To avoid it, you need some kind of moderation mechanism or review system. Both of these have trade-offs which require some form of active management to avoid gaming, which isn't free.
ajbt200128 2y ago
Product Hunt inherently cannot be """Gentrified"""". There are no limited resources and no real community to disrupt. There are no laws or systems that have been changed or weaponized to push out a marginalized group. Please choose a better analogy
yogini 2y ago
The current state of Product Hunt is sad. We launched our site in May 2022 and got an amazing response, very good visibility, and ended up being the product of the day. We also created a lot of buzz with this. Then, we were going out of beta so we launched again in Jan 2024. This time the launch wasn't as good. We got only 10% of the traffic as of 2022 even after being Product of the day again. Lots of spam from people to get fake upvotes. I totally understand that at the scale of PH, this is a hard problem to solve. But back in 2023, we created a feature in our app called Peerlist Project Spotlight to showcase and launch side projects. But instead of daily we made it weekly. The idea was to give side projects better visibility and prepare projects for a bigger launch on the product hunt, but now people are considering Peerlist Spotlight as an alternative to the PH launch.

102 points by padseeker 2y ago

Product Hunt exists to make Product Hunt money and not promote your business. If you look at it through that lens, it makes perfect sense what is going on there.

_pdp_ 2y ago
The only reason Product Hunt exists is because others use it to promote their business. ;) making money from all of this is simply a side-effect of the value add.
- bdcravens 2y ago
  You could say that about any advertising product, none of which are necessarily altruistic.

snapcaster 2y ago

I don't know anything about product hunt or the people discussed, but it is infuriating when a product person doesn't know the product. I'm happy to work at company currently where the product org is very competent and are "power users" of the products. I think it makes a HUGE difference

dbreunig 2y ago

I launched an app on Product Hunt several months ago. I found the exercise of listing the app and creating the content for the listing a worthwhile exercise, but nothing else about the experience worthwhile. Every day its listings are filled with redundant apps, template shovelware, wrappers around AI APIs, and random non-app content (think ebooks, blog posts, courses, etc.) Very occasionally you'll find a useful utility or two by a independent team (but you gotta scroll wayyy down). PH has completely failed to defend their ranking algorithms against spam and brigading.

gkoberger 2y ago

This is based on a very misleading typo. On Sept 25, Jason tweeted that the CTO (not CEO, as this article states) didn't know who levelsio is. In October, the CEO wrote about levelsio, so he does indeed know who he is. (https://www.linkedin.com/posts/rajiv-ayyangar_why-doesnt-product-hunt-have-a-separate-activity-7236402552198565890-vBI4/ https://www.linkedin.com/posts/rajiv-ayyangar_why-doesnt-pro...) Assuming it's true, I don't know if the CTO really needs to know who levelsio is. The CEO does, but does the CTO?

padseeker 2y ago
I made a mistake, it will be corrected asap. Thanks for the heads up.
- gkoberger 2y ago
  Doesn't it undermine your whole point, though? Your most damning point was at best a typo and at worst a fictional story. Like, don't you think the head of growth might have an incentive to cause the issues you're mentioning? Doesn't the CEO implying the story isn't true give you pause? Did you look at the head of growth's LinkedIn? Did nothing about their resume (which I won't post here) give you pause before writing a whole post? I agree Product Hunt is different than it was years ago. So is the entire startup ecosystem. But this article just came off as sour grapes, where you cherry-picked stories to try to make an argument.
  - padseeker 2y ago
    Are you saying that the one letter typo on the one of my many points surrounding the drama at Product Hunt discredit the whole thing? No I do not. Maybe I should have shared in the article all the twitter posts where indie hackers are upset how they are getting screwed and how hard it is to get ranked on PH. There is a lot more drama surrounding PH than just the CTO not knowing one well known community member.
    - gkoberger 2y ago

skmurphy 2y ago

Key points: 1. There are many to launch but most of the sites don’t have the community or credibility that PH seems to have lost. 2. If you want what PH was 3-4 years ago you have to go somewhere else. 3. If you want to build the new Product Hunt you can’t just create a site where people can submit their product and launch. You need affordances that cultivate community. 4. Once you get traction you should expect some members will game your system: successful systems always attract parasites.

skmurphy 2y ago
I think these two articles are relevant for #4 https://gwern.net/doc/technology/2005-shirky-agroupisitsownworstenemy.pdf https://gwern.net/doc/technology/2005-shirky-agroupisitsownw... https://www.skmurphy.com/blog/2014/09/15/guidelines-for-an-online-community-of-entrepreneurs/ https://www.skmurphy.com/blog/2014/09/15/guidelines-for-an-o...
PaulHoule 2y ago
I don’t believe in the value of the Product Hunt “community”. The point of marketing is to get your product in front of customers, not to get it front of members of a community of deadbeat marketers who think they’re doing their job when they get their product in front of non-customers. If your product is “one weird trick” to get your product on the top of Product Hunt that’s appropriate for Product Hunt, but that’s about it.
- minimaxir 2y ago
  > The point of marketing is to get your product in front of customers, not to get it front of members of a community of deadbeat marketers But what if the customers are deadbeat marketers?
  - PaulHoule 2y ago
    If they're not willing to put in the elbow grease I don't think most of them will want to spend much money.
- 2y ago

ryandrake 2y ago

Any "Ranking of X" or "Curated List of Y" becomes useless and untrustworthy as soon as a cottage industry springs up around it where people can pay to boost their ranking or get on the lists. SEO, Amazon ratings, YouTube recommendations, even meatspace things like college rankings. This seems like The Big Problem that recommendation / discovery sites have been failing to solve for decades.

lovethevoid 2y ago
They haven't been failing to solve it, that's what they're explicitly optimizing for.

andrewstuart 2y ago

Maybe all sites aimed at indie developers become a spammy sleaze district given time and it’s necessary for a new site to arise where initially only the techy developer entrepreneurs hang until the sleaze follows and the cycle repeats. I’ve been reading that the same thing has happened to indie hackers.

minimaxir 2y ago

"Becoming" gentrified? Product Hunt's value proposition since the beginning was to launder credibility from "friends"/VCs promoting apps without having to disclose conflicts of interests. It never was fair to indie creators and able to fulfill its stated purpose of surfacing the best products.

andrewstuart 2y ago

If you are coming up with the”next product hunt”, please ensure the list of launched companies is one straight list of all the companies in random order. It’s never made sense that PH shows only a selection of the launches and you need to click to see them all … that’s fundamentally unfair. Also, there should be no new launches to be added to the list - it should accumulate launches for the past 24 hours hidden and then launch them all simultaneously - the time that a product as added to the list in the past 24 hours should not be a factor in how many upvotes it gets. Related, it should not be important to launch at 12:00PM pacific time or whatever it is - makes no sense. Maybe there should be AI trained to categorise and tag them such that you can filter out all those that you are not interested in, such as #HTMLtemplates or #crypto or #AI

rajivayyangar 2y ago

(I'm the CEO of Product Hunt) This isn't far off the mark, but I do want to push back on two things. One: "VC backed companies have the funds to be able to boost their launch on PH to guarantee their launch will be in the top 5." - absolutely not. We do not tolerate paying for votes or other means of artificially boosting score. Two: "its going to be a lot harder for you, the side hustler, the soloprenuer, the full time bootstrapper" - It's true that the bar is higher, but it's because The Market is more competitive. It was a personal goal of mine when I stepped in a year ago to make Product Hunt into a place where you can launch your side projects and they can rise to the top. To do that, we need to reduce the noise a bit and ensure that community and organic signal are balanced. This is difficult, but we're working on it. For example, Chris Van Pelt's side project OpenUI (open source v0) was #2 of the day a little while ago - hunted by a friend without any launch prep. Product Hunt changed my life - I launched a side project that got tons of traction and it caused me and my friends to jump in full-time and start a company. I want to make Product Hunt an even stronger force for changing lives than it's been in the past, but that requires evolving the platform for the market in 2024.

bastawhiz 2y ago
What percentage of "featured" products each day are indie side projects?
padseeker 2y ago
I appreciate your comment, and the honesty. This post is certainly being critical, but I'm also not here to bring the hammer down. I am saying that it has grown very popular, and that makes it harder to get noticed. I know more than a few people have publicly complained on twitter about how their startup listing has been removed or bumped. I also know there are a lot of scammers out there that PH has to battle against, trying to game the system. I know the people at G2.com when they started and were giving away free ipads for the top people with the most software reviews in a month, and someone tried to jump ahead by downvoting all the reviews of the people ahead of them in a month. Clearly though expectations have changed. I'm certainly bummed for the 60% of the staff who were laid off. You can't just share your startup without some serious work beforehand or else you risk blowing your shot at 15 minutes of startup internet fame. My point is not that PH is dying or not, but the game has changed and it has hurt makers who do this for the hope of making a full time living, and we're being crowded out by VC funded startups and previous PH launchers who have had past success (i.e. Tallyforms) that are "relaunching" and sucking up the little amount of attention available on PH. It's frustrating.

joshdavham 2y ago

Any reason you don’t want to take a crack at building another product hunt? You’ve identified the problem, you have opinions and clearly care about this stuff. What’s holding you back?

minimaxir 2y ago
"Let's see you do better" isn't a counterargument. The better conclusion (supported by the CEO's response in this thread) is that there may not be a clear reason for Product Hunt-type site to exist in 2024.
- joshdavham 2y ago
  This was not a counter argument. Just a question.

rpgbr 2y ago

Honestly, what really disappoints is how PH is easy to be dominated by questionable trends — once it was NFTs, then web3, nowadays it's hard to find a non-AI popular product over there.

PaulHoule 2y ago

I don’t know what was ever cool about it. Product Hunt might put your product in front of Product Hunt enthusiasts but putting it front of your customers is priceless.

the_clarence 2y ago

As a user I thought it was fantastic in its beginnings, and then I just grew tired of looking at a pletaura of new products and new apps every day. I suspect noone needs that frequency of product updates unless they're addicted to product updates. I'd rather read HN or twitter and get a bag of diverse news from the people I follow who will organically amplify cool things.

SmellTheGlove 2y ago

I still don’t understand what the purpose of product hunt is. Who is the audience and what does a founder concretely gain from launching on PH?

PaulHoule 2y ago
It’s a delusion and has always been a delusion. Marketing is hard work, you have to identify who the target customer is and try to get inside their head. Whether you are trying for paid advertising or organic SEO or a bombastic pseudo-event like https://actiondrivenpodcast.com/salesforce-vs-siebel-protests/ https://actiondrivenpodcast.com/salesforce-vs-siebel-protest... it takes some combination of money, time, energy, elbow grease and creativity. Product Hunt offers a chance to bypass all that. It’s particularly seductive to the independent creator who hopes that can bypass the hard work of marketing altogether. (I am thinking right now of a friend who plans to post thousands of videos to Tik Tok without any marketing effort…) The problem is not that it is hard to get on the front page, the problem is that there is no pot of gold at the end of that rainbow at all, not for a business which isn’t aimed squarely at the center of the crowd that wakes up and checks Product Hunt every morning (an app that promises you’ll frontpage PH? PH 2.0?)

spirobelv2 2y ago

product hunt seems like a great place to explain your product in detail to your competition. how many potential real users frequent this site? it seems like the primary audience is people that are trying to do what your are doing.

dorian-graph 2y ago

The comments sections have had the same vibe and usefulness as LinkedIn influencers and grifters for a couple of years now.

charlie0 2y ago

The issue with not charging is spam. To avoid it, you need some kind of moderation mechanism or review system. Both of these have trade-offs which require some form of active management to avoid gaming, which isn't free.

ajbt200128 2y ago

Product Hunt inherently cannot be """Gentrified"""". There are no limited resources and no real community to disrupt. There are no laws or systems that have been changed or weaponized to push out a marginalized group. Please choose a better analogy

yogini 2y ago

The current state of Product Hunt is sad. We launched our site in May 2022 and got an amazing response, very good visibility, and ended up being the product of the day. We also created a lot of buzz with this. Then, we were going out of beta so we launched again in Jan 2024. This time the launch wasn't as good. We got only 10% of the traffic as of 2022 even after being Product of the day again. Lots of spam from people to get fake upvotes. I totally understand that at the scale of PH, this is a hard problem to solve. But back in 2023, we created a feature in our app called Peerlist Project Spotlight to showcase and launch side projects. But instead of daily we made it weekly. The idea was to give side projects better visibility and prepare projects for a bigger launch on the product hunt, but now people are considering Peerlist Spotlight as an alternative to the PH launch.