[emdowling]

Pre-ProductHunt, HN was the place to launch your product[1]. Having a "Show HN" post reach the front page was (is?) the ultimate brag, and founders would always mention it in seed/Series A pitch decks if it had happened to them. Being featured on HN would usually mean being contacted by a TechCrunch reporter, and that was a Big Deal. So, you'd use your personal connections to make sure everyone upvoted your post. If you were all in the same location (eg: co-working space), you'd tell everyone to use a VPN or tether to their phone to avoid being IP-blocked[2].

Then, ProductHunt came along with the pitch to be more curated, and to speficially solve the launch promotion problem. Now, people have figured out how to game it, just like they did with HN.

I fully expect the cycle to continue with a new ProductHunt with the same value proposition. For Web3, Twitter seems to be doing that job pretty well.

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[1] The launch of my own startup (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4196585)

[2] Source: I was in 500 Startups Batch 5, and we were all advised on how to upvote each other's HN posts in a way to avoid bans.