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Comment by swyx | Hacker News Reader

its just a massive pyramid scheme. everybody goes there to vote, and roll the dice on getting the #1 tag for fake social proof. its useful for social proof insofar as the vast majority of people dont know that product hunt is fake.

semi related fun fact, i had a friend run the numbers for fun - 8% of "#1 of the day" winners die within a year of launch https://twitter.com/jakobgreenfeld/status/146816583831853875...

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I spent ~3 years building a product before launching on PH. It's a real product with an existing community of (at the time) around 1k on Slack and real companies using it. Got ~80 up votes and finished the day somewhere around position 10. I was moderately happy with it.

Around the same time, a known smooth-talking vaporware peddlar in the same industry launched on PH with literally a bare GH repo and a minimal landing page. I knew 100% that there was no actual usable product. The founder had recently been involved in a similar project that collapsed under huge promises. He got hundreds of upvotes and plenty of "awesome product, LFG man!!!" type comments.

That's the moment I really understood PH.

I don’t think there’s much that can be taken from that. There’s a lot of reasons products die within a year, the non-product hunt #1 rate is probably much much higher. People post products on there all the time that aren’t meant to be some startup in the first place

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