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Comment by flashm | Hacker News Reader

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flashm

My main issue with Product Hunt is that most of the products are so trivial that it almost seems like a parody site.

A sample from right now:

'The funniest dog name generator ever'

'Fast and easy way of collecting email addresses'

'Finally, an emoji keyboard for the modern desktop'

Don't people have more interesting things to do with their time, or try to create more interesting, useful products?

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Yeah, it cracks me up nearly every time. I mean, there's definitely a place for little projects like this where a couple people say "man there's gotta be a better way to collect email addresses and put them in a shared doc" and put something together. It's like a novelist writing a little two-page short story - just someone executing an idea.

But there are so many, and they're often so overwrought! I guess it's really easy to make a professional-looking landing page for stuff now, but that doesn't excuse the vapid self-hype the items give to themselves: "Hat management will never be the same again." "Prepare to start a new life with this revolutionary alarm app." "You've never experienced productivity unless you've tried these Slack automation scripts." (fake but still representative)

So yeah. I've thought about doing a column mocking these things but it would probably just leave me more jaded.

Product Hunt's greatest success is being the perfect reflection of the Silicon Valley industry and mindset that surrounds it. Whether you consider this a feature or a bug is a personal judgement.

Personally I'm glad it exists because it seems to divert at least some of the vacuous SV sycophancy away from Hacker News.

Your first paragraph deserves to live in a poster.

And everyone responds with: (these are usually the top comments btw)

"great product! awesome team! :)"

"Love these guys and the future of work looking so beautiful"

"This is awesome"

"this is awesome"

"Probably one of my favourite teams lately."

"this is wonderful. Thank you for this. Can't wait to start contributing, if that ever becomes a possibility."

What I'm amazed at is that very few people actually comment on the value/benefits of the product and focus more on the (1) team building it (2) the design/beauty of the landing page (3) a virtual high five. It seems a little...backwards...no?

If vote brigading is the main way for products to make front page (per the original article), then this type of behavior follows logically. Chances are 90% of those commenters did not actually try the product itself.

To me, the weirdest thing about Product Hunt is the lackluster name. The word "product" mostly makes me think of SKUs and novelty plastic junk.

Who really wants to be a "product hunter"? The excitement factor in that would seem to fall somewhere between "discount shopper" and "logistics manager"...

I actually like their name when paired with the cat, which is a "hunter".

Small projects have a higher likelihood of being on the front page since they're quicker to build. You see more of them.

There are many large, non-trivial products that rise up and have way more votes than the trivial ones - it just happens less often. Check out some of the collections of most upvoted products over time ranges, for example: https://www.producthunt.com/e/most-upvoted-in-tech

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