This is mostly a disappointing response that tries to deflect with "hey, we do good stuff too!" which is a PR move, not an argument against the events which caused the accusations against Product Hunt.
The highlighted quote and central thesis of "Everyone’s upvote is equal — my upvote counts the same as yours" misses the point that the product selection process is opaque, and the updated FAQ of "we receive so may products per day!" does not absolve PH of that. (it's a 2 year old startup. They no longer get a pass on scalability issues).
Speaking of the FAQ, here's the update discussing conflicts of interest:
> "Do I need to disclose that I’m invested or advising a company I post to Product Hunt?
Product Hunt is a place for authentic, honest conversation and we highly encourage people to disclose any potential conflict of interest in the comment thread."
...which misses the point entirely. The conflicts-of-interest are with the moderators themselves, and friends-of-friends of the submitters. And given the culture of PH, very few people will disclose a conflict of interest willingly if it hurts them.
I'm not reassured that anything will change in the near future.
EDIT: Added my comment to the comments on the Medium article.
Ryan Hoover's response to "How Product Hunt really works" article on Twitter:
<person1>: Seems bad for @ProductHunt. Changes my perception of them. <link to article>
Ryan Hoover: sad to hear, <person1> :(
<person2>: That's all you have to say, really? Jerk.
I also wrote an article [1] about PH, prompted by Ben Wheeler's original, noting that I was afraid to speak out earlier because I believed it would hurt my chances of getting funded. That's probably true, but whatever.
Hoover's response is weak. He's basically saying that they have improved their FAQ. Woo, that's really reassuring. Anyway, I'll take my chances with Open Hunt, or anywhere else that values an open community for that matter.
What struck me from the HN thread on the article this is responding to was the vitriol directed towards Ryan. The general consensus seemed to be that he was a terrible person who was using Product Hunt to perpetuate the "Old Boys Club" in tech. From my experience dealing with him, that seems like the polar opposite from the truth. I don't know him well, but he appears to be a genuinely nice guy who loves discovering new technology and wants to enable people to share their creations with a wider audience. I do believe the OC made a number of valid points, and Product Hunt needs to evolve so that insiders have less influence. Still, it saddens me that HN's reaction was to make personal attacks and accusations. (most of the evidence given was anecdotal, too) I think Ryan's response clears up the reasoning behind why Product Hunt is structured the way it is. I hope that in the future members of the HN community stop and think before they make personal attacks based on a one-sided Medium article.
I hope you weren't reading my comment that I feel less inclined to visit a site where only the old boys club get to comment as vitriol or a personal attack of all things. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10762260
Just as a matter of taste I don't want to spend time on the outside looking in on an invite-only community. I'd simply go elsewhere. I'm not a huge fan of elitism and exclusivity in general.
One situation where it's not quite as bad if there are very transparent, specific criteria. E.g. "you can't comment unless you've built a product >10,000 people use" is much better than "you can't comment unless you're on our social graph".
I knew Ryan pretty well when we worked together several years ago and I can honestly say he is a really nice guy that is passionate about technology. I am not totally conversant about the issues happening here but I'm sure about that.
I don't care how nice he is in person, just as I don't care how mean Steve Jobs was. I judge people by the products they put out. If his product perpetuates the power structures of Silicon Valley and gives insiders special access then he's actually not a very nice guy.
> ...The problem is not so much the money itself as what comes with it. As one VC who spoke at Y Combinator said, "Once you take several million dollars of my money, the clock is ticking." If VCs fund you, they're not going to let you just put the money in the bank and keep operating as two guys living on ramen. They want that money to go to work.
This is an example of A16Z killing a startup. They only care about about the big hits, so they'll happily dump too-many-millions into small products like ProductHunt and RapGenius, trying to force them to Get Big Fast.
ProductHunt should've been operated by two people for 5+ years but they raised too much money. Communities can't really be bought with money. You have to grow them organically and authentically over many years. Hacker News and reddit are perfect examples to emulate.
Remember at Demo Day in their W11 batch, they had both: more traffic than every other startup in the batch combined, and more than any other YC startup at any demo day in history [1].
1: Source: The Launch Pad: Inside Y Combinator
2: I think the fall off in the last year is due to rebranding to just Genius.
Blaming it all on the VCs may not be the complete picture. There are companies raising millions and not spending most of it and still doing good. Do VCs force people to take money even if they don't want to?
I just wanted to suggest to everyone here who is building a product this thought: product hunt didn't launch on product hunt. It was a simple email test which found an audience and grew from there. That's the opposite of hoping to launch on some list of top products and grab an audience.
It's not a bad thing, but you don't need it. And if you're counting on it having a major impact on your traction, you probably shouldn't be.
I wish every single person that is upset about ProductHunt's ethics internalizes this comment.
The only people that should really care about PH's ethics are makers. But if you're a maker, you shouldn't care at all about PH. You should be busy talking to users and building product. If you're not seeing traction by doing those two things, then it is nigh impossible that getting on PH will do anything for you. And if you do have traction then getting on PH won't matter!
This. Nobody owes you anything, the least of all some perceived "fairness" in Valley media. In the prioritized list of things I need to accomplish to continually move my startup forward, "spending time thinking about Product Hunt" is sandwiched somewhere between "Start an Ello account" and "attend more pay-to-pitch events."
Isn't this how it always goes? Something controversial happens, someone shows an alternative, it gets praise and a flood of users and is within a week forgotten about. E.g. reddit > voat recently.
Digg > reddit doesn't count, as they actually broke their site.
All you have to do is look at Ryan Hoover's "recommended" comments on his own post to get a sense of his position on things. This is a weak attempt at damage control that shows absolutely no desire on his part to address the central issue with Product Hunt: those people (in particular, those who aren't PH employees) who can arbitrarily post startups to the front page with no differentiation from those who made it there via popularity.
Of course they won't change it. The whole "game" is to provide a system that on the surface looks meritocratic, but actually isn't, in order to give visitors the impression that the arbitrarily posted products / sites are popular (because they must be to have made it to the front page), and thus drive traffic to them. It's dodgy.
- Ability to get the in-crowd at Product Hunt to approve of my product for voting on their site. NOPE.
The response was the same canned one that others have mentioned. AZ buying a product news outlet to advance their other startups is a vague accusation, but in my world not in the tin-hat territory whatsoever.
I glanced at your bio and recent comments. I'll take a guess that Semantic UI is the product you're referring to.
It looks like it was posted and got a few upvotes, but only shows in search results after clicking "Show all" on the right. I'm not positive, but perhaps this is a way upcoming posts are differentiated from front page posts.
My big takeaway from the original post was that "early insiders" controlled the frontpage of ProductHunt. This post confirms that "early insiders" can still post straight to the frontpage. I see data from this blog post that is presenting an argument that the "early insiders" are a small percentage of the currently upvotes, but I don't understand why someone would opt for viral effects if you could just have an "early insider" post it directly.
When I view the Product Hunt frontpage, I see nothing to indicate that a submission has been 'boosted' and that seems to be an area that could be improved if "early insiders" will continue to have the boosting ability.
Product Hunt faces a difficult challenge. Many people from the software/startup world are egalitarian, yet Product Hunt is a business. They must find a balance.
A more democratic approach to this would work much better than the insider model they've adopted. Hacker News isn't a business, Reddit is, yet both are egalitarian. There does exist a balance that works.
They've solved the problem of sorting good/curated products based on upvotes, but that is not the true problem.
The harder problem is ensuring new products can reach the front page fairly. Reddit would not be the amazing community it is today if there were a curation team at Reddit determining what should be on the front page. If I were PH, I would focus on this problem.
I would urge them to address the issues that the community is bringing up. His post does not seem to indicate any change will occur.
Literally addresses NONE of the issues presented in the piece he's responding to. No one questioned the upvote system and how much each vote counted, though I'd say that's still dubious. When insiders exist to get your product on the home page and no one who doesn't use that method gets on the home page, and you have coordinated launches using SPECIFIC TIMES that it will be on the front page, you don't get to come out in a medium post with a cute cat and go "But, we didn't do that!"
As I've said previously on here I'm a capitalist and I respect greed, but I don't tolerate liars. If you going to build and insiders promotion site, then do it, and own it. Don't backpedal when someone calls you out.
I know, right? So when I see all the HN comments about how dare we be angry at this person and how straightforward and ethical they are and that they only care about the community... it feels even more infuriating.
It started off as a curated newsletter and became a portal. It never fully embraced a community-driven approach (as evidenced by their opaque curation policy) nor a pivot to a more search engine/yelp-like community. In essence, they have yet to conquer their scalability problem: how to maintain quality while increasing quantity of products. It's a bloomin' hard problem to be fair to them.
What I am most disappointed by is that with network effects, it is beneficial for a community as a whole to have one dominant portal. The one thing you want for a dominant community platform is transparency (there's an argument for decentralization too), a requirement that has yet to be met.
Wow what a crock of shit. They got called out for back room deals and ignoring products; and it's only after a revolt ready to make their entire operation obsolete that they publish a half hearted PR response that admits no responsibility at all.
> Once the product has received a significant number of credible upvotes (those that aren’t manipulated by voting rings) from the community, will be promoted to the homepage within 48 hours.
> Everyone’s upvote is equal — my upvote counts the same as yours — and ultimately upvotes determine what rises to the top of Product Hunt.
I encourage everyone with unanswered questions to participate in Product Hunt's LIVE chat. If you feel like a point wasn't adequately covered, drop by and ask Product Hunt's team directly. (link is from the article)
https://www.producthunt.com/live/product-hunt-team
I’m unsure as to why the Product Hunt outrage in particular. Every major distribution platform (the press, social networks, app stores, even Hacker News) favors insiders. Has PH been presented as a solution to this problem? (I never thought so, but perhaps I haven’t been paying such close attention.)
This is a response to the traction openhunt is getting. Another version of "I'm sorry we got caught".
Ryan, maybe had good intentions at the beginning then got carried away with the "stardom" and of course, with $6 million in the bank, a bit of arrogance took hold.
His initial response to the Medium article was "lol", while that of the posse was "fuck the haters". He forgot his remit was building a massive community and not a small clique.
Competition is good. It makes people humble.
Product Hunt cannot change. It's "community" is vested in ensuring things remain the same. Just like fat cats.
My only interaction with Product Hunt was through the email harvester they ran on 17 December 2014 (a few months after joining Y Combinator) which found our company's public info@ email address and subscribed it to Product Hunt.
[+] [-] minimaxir|10 years ago|reply
The highlighted quote and central thesis of "Everyone’s upvote is equal — my upvote counts the same as yours" misses the point that the product selection process is opaque, and the updated FAQ of "we receive so may products per day!" does not absolve PH of that. (it's a 2 year old startup. They no longer get a pass on scalability issues).
Speaking of the FAQ, here's the update discussing conflicts of interest:
> "Do I need to disclose that I’m invested or advising a company I post to Product Hunt? Product Hunt is a place for authentic, honest conversation and we highly encourage people to disclose any potential conflict of interest in the comment thread."
...which misses the point entirely. The conflicts-of-interest are with the moderators themselves, and friends-of-friends of the submitters. And given the culture of PH, very few people will disclose a conflict of interest willingly if it hurts them.
I'm not reassured that anything will change in the near future.
EDIT: Added my comment to the comments on the Medium article.
[+] [-] avinassh|10 years ago|reply
can you tell me more about this? I do have a PH account, I have hardly used it, so I don't know much.
[+] [-] tedmiston|10 years ago|reply
1. There was a controversial Medium post 6 days ago accusing Product Hunt's ranking system of being unfair amongst other things.
> How Product Hunt really works (medium.com)
687 points by brw12 6 days ago | 222 comments
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10739875
2. Then the same day someone started a signup sheet to build an open version.
> Let's Create a Better Product Hunt (docs.google.com)
222 points by BetterLaunch 6 days ago | 98 comments
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10741827
3. Then someone built and launched it.
> Show HN: Open Hunt – an open and community-run alternative to Product Hunt (openhunt.co)
1072 points by mhurwi 3 days ago | 176 comments
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10759879
For most of the day on Friday, Open Hunt sat at the #1 spot on Product Hunt, and Ryan Hoover was a good sport about it.
https://www.producthunt.com/tech/open-hunt
[+] [-] frik|10 years ago|reply
Someone pointed to this conversation in the OpenHunt discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10759879 -> https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10760462
[+] [-] sparkzilla|10 years ago|reply
Hoover's response is weak. He's basically saying that they have improved their FAQ. Woo, that's really reassuring. Anyway, I'll take my chances with Open Hunt, or anywhere else that values an open community for that matter.
[1]http://newslines.org/blog/the-new-gatekeeper/
[+] [-] josephpmay|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] xiaoma|10 years ago|reply
Just as a matter of taste I don't want to spend time on the outside looking in on an invite-only community. I'd simply go elsewhere. I'm not a huge fan of elitism and exclusivity in general.
One situation where it's not quite as bad if there are very transparent, specific criteria. E.g. "you can't comment unless you've built a product >10,000 people use" is much better than "you can't comment unless you're on our social graph".
[+] [-] jtmcmc|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] troels|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sparkzilla|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] staunch|10 years ago|reply
http://paulgraham.com/startupmistakes.html
This is an example of A16Z killing a startup. They only care about about the big hits, so they'll happily dump too-many-millions into small products like ProductHunt and RapGenius, trying to force them to Get Big Fast.
ProductHunt should've been operated by two people for 5+ years but they raised too much money. Communities can't really be bought with money. You have to grow them organically and authentically over many years. Hacker News and reddit are perfect examples to emulate.
Digg is an example of the VC way of doing things.
[+] [-] tedmiston|10 years ago|reply
Google Trends "rap genius": https://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=%22rap%20genius%22&c... [2]
Remember at Demo Day in their W11 batch, they had both: more traffic than every other startup in the batch combined, and more than any other YC startup at any demo day in history [1].
1: Source: The Launch Pad: Inside Y Combinator
2: I think the fall off in the last year is due to rebranding to just Genius.
[+] [-] mkagenius|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] matt2000|10 years ago|reply
It's not a bad thing, but you don't need it. And if you're counting on it having a major impact on your traction, you probably shouldn't be.
[+] [-] OmarIsmail|10 years ago|reply
The only people that should really care about PH's ethics are makers. But if you're a maker, you shouldn't care at all about PH. You should be busy talking to users and building product. If you're not seeing traction by doing those two things, then it is nigh impossible that getting on PH will do anything for you. And if you do have traction then getting on PH won't matter!
[+] [-] Disruptive_Dave|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kevindeasis|10 years ago|reply
Just look at this HN post: Show HN: Open Hunt – an open and community-run alternative to Product Hunt (openhunt.co) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10759879 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10741827
How about their ranking system: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10739875
[+] [-] wingerlang|10 years ago|reply
Isn't this how it always goes? Something controversial happens, someone shows an alternative, it gets praise and a flood of users and is within a week forgotten about. E.g. reddit > voat recently.
Digg > reddit doesn't count, as they actually broke their site.
[+] [-] empressplay|10 years ago|reply
Of course they won't change it. The whole "game" is to provide a system that on the surface looks meritocratic, but actually isn't, in order to give visitors the impression that the arbitrarily posted products / sites are popular (because they must be to have made it to the front page), and thus drive traffic to them. It's dodgy.
[+] [-] jlukic|10 years ago|reply
- Front page of HN, check.
- Top trending weekly product on GitHub. Check.
- Ability to get the in-crowd at Product Hunt to approve of my product for voting on their site. NOPE.
The response was the same canned one that others have mentioned. AZ buying a product news outlet to advance their other startups is a vague accusation, but in my world not in the tin-hat territory whatsoever.
[+] [-] tedmiston|10 years ago|reply
It looks like it was posted and got a few upvotes, but only shows in search results after clicking "Show all" on the right. I'm not positive, but perhaps this is a way upcoming posts are differentiated from front page posts.
https://www.producthunt.com/tech/semantic-ui
[+] [-] vincent_s|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] swanson|10 years ago|reply
When I view the Product Hunt frontpage, I see nothing to indicate that a submission has been 'boosted' and that seems to be an area that could be improved if "early insiders" will continue to have the boosting ability.
[+] [-] tonydiv|10 years ago|reply
A more democratic approach to this would work much better than the insider model they've adopted. Hacker News isn't a business, Reddit is, yet both are egalitarian. There does exist a balance that works.
They've solved the problem of sorting good/curated products based on upvotes, but that is not the true problem.
The harder problem is ensuring new products can reach the front page fairly. Reddit would not be the amazing community it is today if there were a curation team at Reddit determining what should be on the front page. If I were PH, I would focus on this problem.
I would urge them to address the issues that the community is bringing up. His post does not seem to indicate any change will occur.
[+] [-] ascendantlogic|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sergiotapia|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] FussyZeus|10 years ago|reply
As I've said previously on here I'm a capitalist and I respect greed, but I don't tolerate liars. If you going to build and insiders promotion site, then do it, and own it. Don't backpedal when someone calls you out.
[+] [-] aaronbrethorst|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hoodoof|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] maceo|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sqldba|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thetmkay|10 years ago|reply
It started off as a curated newsletter and became a portal. It never fully embraced a community-driven approach (as evidenced by their opaque curation policy) nor a pivot to a more search engine/yelp-like community. In essence, they have yet to conquer their scalability problem: how to maintain quality while increasing quantity of products. It's a bloomin' hard problem to be fair to them.
What I am most disappointed by is that with network effects, it is beneficial for a community as a whole to have one dominant portal. The one thing you want for a dominant community platform is transparency (there's an argument for decentralization too), a requirement that has yet to be met.
[+] [-] sqldba|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rjvir|10 years ago|reply
> Everyone’s upvote is equal — my upvote counts the same as yours — and ultimately upvotes determine what rises to the top of Product Hunt.
To me, this was a direct contradiction.
[+] [-] JMCQ87|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jrometty|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] byoogle|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] minimaxir|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] OoTheNigerian|10 years ago|reply
This is a response to the traction openhunt is getting. Another version of "I'm sorry we got caught".
Ryan, maybe had good intentions at the beginning then got carried away with the "stardom" and of course, with $6 million in the bank, a bit of arrogance took hold.
His initial response to the Medium article was "lol", while that of the posse was "fuck the haters". He forgot his remit was building a massive community and not a small clique.
Competition is good. It makes people humble.
Product Hunt cannot change. It's "community" is vested in ensuring things remain the same. Just like fat cats.
Reminds me of a certain logo.
Coincidence?
Edited: $6million not $16 million series A
[+] [-] rl3|10 years ago|reply
Uh, what?[0]
Also, I'd argue that Product Hunt's Series A was almost modest in light of their popularity and growth last year.
[0] https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/product-hunt/
[+] [-] thecupisblue|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] alexatkeplar|10 years ago|reply