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Comment by sparkzilla | Hacker News Reader

Product Hunt's rigged system affects everyone in the startup community. Some of those insider's products had ZERO traction before being on Product Hunt. The insider relationship gave them the boost they needed to get attention from the media and VCs, while denying other startups who were spending their time doing what you say: "talking to users and building product".

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I honestly recommend you don't worry about it. If your users love your product then you'll be fine, and the only way I know how to do that is talking to users, iterating and just trying to figure things out. If you get those things right you won't have problems with press, VCs, etc.

I know this is a gross simplification, but it's really worth trying to focus on what matters because there's so many ways to get distracted.

Again, who says the world is supposed to be fair? Am I supposed to believe that every product written about in TechCrunch is there because of its merits alone? What about funding? We should probably band together on forums to talk about how some founders are born into money and VC relationships and others aren't. This all seems a bit silly, to be honest.

It's kind of that they give the impression it's a fair vote when it isn't that's annoying. And indeed the world isn't fair. However individual sites can be. It reminds me a bit of the early days of Google vs search engines where you could buy higher placement or Stackoverflow vs Experts Exchange neither of which went so good for the unfair players.

Wow. A brand new product review site that nobody has ever heard of is in complete control over the startup landscape. Has anyone sold the movie rights yet?

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