What Happened to Product Hunt?

Emails and tweets asking for upvotes is how Product Hunt is supposed to work.

The signal it provides is filtered against founders who won’t do that kind of necessary dirty work. Necessary in the context of a VC funded startup.

The thesis is a founder who is willing to hype bullshit will tend to produce better returns than a founder who believes themselves above pestering friends and strangers.

It filters out those founders who will only bet on if-you-build-it-they-will-come.

Product Hunt is one of those things I didn’t get because it wasn’t what I thought it was.

I mean I was right that it mostly smelled like a steamy pile of horseshit I was better to avoid.

That semipermeability is its value proposition…at least so far as I can tell.

I think Product Hunt is about identifying founders primarily and products only incidentally.

Product Hunt, from the beginning, was a way for investors/VCs to launder credibility and endorsement with an affiliated product without disclosure.

Now that PH has lost that particular influence over the years (which to be fair they tried to pivot many times as a result), it's just the actual bad products that are left.

Product Hunt is a step away from spam on a good day, and I'm not surprised to see how much worse it's gotten. Even most of the products now are just templates

I was gonna say

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September

except Product Hunt never appealed to me. It seemed to attract people who were interested in the idea of products but not who were interested in products.

The same thing that happened with viral advertisements or social media stars. Industry plants.

I seriously cannot understand whether people truly care that much about yet another Notion -> X tool. They aren't that cool nor useful. Funny enough those tools go under with some shutting down story on IndieHackers a year later.

From what I've read from various "Growth Hackers" here on HN, IH, and PH, it's that many people will pay for likes, pay for shoutouts on newsletters/videos/etc to get those likes, and all to get the "Best Seller" / "Most Popular" product status to make a quick buck in the short term and then left wondering why nobody uses the product a year later.

I've become a bit jaded to these communities because you start to realize how "fake" they are such as how things will make the front page by being sponsored or promoted by admins. I'm glad HN doesn't do that to my knowledge thus far. You see your contributions actually go through the gauntlet.

> It’s not a welcome place for consumers to actually find products

Well the search feature on PH is useful for discovering different tools and services you can use in your projects. It's better than HN's Algolia search since it's narrowly focused on SaaS and tooling for different tasks. There's a lot of NoCode tools you can use for your business/project on there, and I regularly use the PH search feature.

I avoid all the hyped-up 'new products' since their popularity is usually artificially inflated and spammed to the frontpage. But if you go digging, you can find some real gems.

I enjoy browsing Product Hunt but it does seem like quick mindless side projects in very hyped-up spaces get more attention than people trying to make things that are seriously new and exciting. It’s also full of people taking a solution-first approach for problems that don’t exist. Still enjoyable but it’s worth being mindful that what you see getting upvoted on there often isn’t reflective of what really has potential.

It has become a place where angel and vC investors hunt for the next investment. It’s not a welcome place for consumers to actually find products (nobody is that stupid to do that)