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

(I&#x27;m the CEO of Product Hunt) This isn&#x27;t far off the mark, but I do want to push back on two things.<p>One: &quot;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.&quot; - absolutely not. We do not tolerate paying for votes or other means of artificially boosting score.<p>Two: &quot;its going to be a lot harder for you, the side hustler, the soloprenuer, the full time bootstrapper&quot; - It&#x27;s true that the bar is higher, but it&#x27;s because <i>The Market</i> 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&#x27;re working on it. For example, Chris Van Pelt&#x27;s side project OpenUI (open source v0) was #2 of the day a little while ago - hunted by a friend without any launch prep.<p>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&#x27;s been in the past, but that requires evolving the platform for the market in 2024.

&quot;Becoming&quot; gentrified?<p>Product Hunt&#x27;s value proposition since the beginning was to launder credibility from &quot;friends&quot;&#x2F;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.

I launched an app on Product Hunt several months ago.<p>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.<p>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&#x27;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.

Any &quot;Ranking of X&quot; or &quot;Curated List of Y&quot; 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 &#x2F; discovery sites have been failing to solve for decades.

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

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&#x27;re addicted to product updates. I&#x27;d rather read HN or twitter and get a bag of diverse news from the people I follow who will organically amplify cool things.

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.<p>I’ve been reading that the same thing has happened to indie hackers.

This is based on a very misleading typo.<p>On Sept 25, Jason tweeted that the CTO (not CEO, as this article states) didn&#x27;t know who levelsio is. In October, the CEO wrote about levelsio, so he does indeed know who he is. (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.linkedin.com&#x2F;posts&#x2F;rajiv-ayyangar_why-doesnt-product-hunt-have-a-separate-activity-7236402552198565890-vBI4&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.linkedin.com&#x2F;posts&#x2F;rajiv-ayyangar_why-doesnt-pro...</a>)<p>Assuming it&#x27;s true, I don&#x27;t know if the CTO really needs to know who levelsio is. The CEO does, but does the CTO?

Key points:<p>1. There are many to launch but most of the sites don’t have the community or credibility that PH seems to have lost.<p>2. If you want what PH was 3-4 years ago you have to go somewhere else.<p>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.<p>4. Once you get traction you should expect some members will game your system: successful systems always attract parasites.

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&#x27;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.<p>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.

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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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

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.

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?

Product Hunt inherently cannot be &quot;&quot;&quot;Gentrified&quot;&quot;&quot;&quot;. 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

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&#x27;t free.

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

I don&#x27;t know anything about product hunt or the people discussed, but it is infuriating when a product person doesn&#x27;t know the product. I&#x27;m happy to work at company currently where the product org is very competent and are &quot;power users&quot; of the products. I think it makes a HUGE difference

Honestly, what really disappoints is how PH is easy to be dominated by questionable trends — once it was NFTs, then web3, nowadays it&#x27;s hard to find a non-AI popular product over there.

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

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?