Ask HN: Is ProductHunt trustworthy/relevant anymore?

When was Product Hunt ever relevant? It's been a joke from day one as far as I can see. Just more inward looking, meta navel-gazing crap. Like you say, the intended audience is not real users anyway.

Unfortunately, a lot of new entrepreneurs took Product Hunt to be gospel, and getting on the top of Product Hunt to be the primary objective of a startup launch, even if it means gaming the system.

The thing is, even if you had 3000 upvotes for instance, all you will most probably get is fake hope of a successful launch, upvotes will be mostly either by: other hunters, founders, infuluencers who didn't even read the description or care a bit about your product, or by newly registerd users who want to skip the welcome page or just trying to understand how this website works by upvoting anything on the home page and then forget about it.

I registered on PH once to post about my product. It made me upvote at least 10 products across a span of 3 days (should be 3 contagious days). You know how I did those.

They added the 3 day check to reduce spam from newly registered users.

2 comments here really matched my opinion.

> a lot of new entrepreneurs took Product Hunt to be gospel .

This is true. I've been in the PH community for 2-3 years, posted a bunch of products, some frontpaging some not. Problem is that now if you post a product that you found and think is cool you might see founders being angry at you because "they were planning for a PH launch and you ruined it!". I've had moments like that where they'd message me asking to delete their product or telling me I shouldn't have posted their product because they were planning for it. Such bullshit.

and

>PH suffers from the fact there are only 1-2 actual useful online products released per week.

True. Lately products have been in 4 categories: "Collection of links to X", "Guide to Y", "Clone of Z" and "New product by a popular company".

Also, the community became kinda shit.

A lot of people won't say anything bad about a product. I saw a product that was made by a "meta-influencer" (eg someone who made a bunch of kinda useless products but that was the reason he was popular in the community) and it was terrible - the UI sucked, the privacy settings were terrible and it broke all the rules of making a quality mobile app. I commented on this stuff and nobody really cared, while comments praising him were at the top saying the app was amazing (it was not. it was basic, terrible and broken in many places). There are a lot of products like that that are shitty or useless, but people still praise them because what was once a "positive but critical community" turned into a "toxic positivity community" that is afraid to call out people on their shit.

As one of the people who spent a lot of time calling out Product Hunt's shenanigans, I've actually had the same question.

I have seen little-to-no discussion about it in the past year on social media/Medium thought pieces, but they have made site redesigns and product releases (e.g. Ship) since.

I don't fully understand the question. What would your expectation from PH be? And why is it deluded?

This kind of sites are followed by people who want to know the next thing. By definition, these people will try a lot of new apps/saas/etc., and so hardly they would be very engaged with yours, as with anything else. However you can get quite some good feedback on specific parts of your project.

I don't see PH to be particularly different, in style and "how to get around the system", than Show HN. The population is prob just different.

For example, I'm personally working on a password manager, and I chose to do a Show HN to gather technical feedback. When I'll work more on the ux/onboarding experience, I'll prob post it to PH to get some feedback on that. In neither case I'd expect to find tons of paying customers. I expect valuable feedback, and perhaps one or two advocates.

Sadly I find that most of the "products" posted are extremely shallow and meta.

It has the same incurable disease other websites have of being cool in the very beginning then degrading to useless junk once it became more well-known. At this point it's worthless for true product showcases.

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

PH suffers from the fact there are only 1-2 actual useful online products released per week.

So most of the stuff you see arent really products like guides to hacking X or curated lists of podcasts. Or Iphone X. so uninteresting.

I had a few projects featured in September and the valuable traffic came from secondary sources - social media, blog posts etc. I think ph is less about users and more about social proof.