Product Hunt Is Dead

First, the good news. It's been one week since FinFam's beta launch! The Show HN post trended nicely, netting enough eyeballs to make me confident that FinFam is the world's first and only collaborative financial planner with a marketplace of interactive, open-source expert opinions. I'm especially gratified by the users I'm meeting through the product. Nothing like it. So, launch is going great, no regrets, right? That brings us to the subject of today's PSA. Product Hunt is dead. I wasn't planning this post. PH wasn't even much of a launch priority for FinFam. But after seeing what I saw, I knew this had to skip the queue. The world had to know. After all, my launch post on LinkedIn mentioned our ProductHunt launch. And now I'm cringing thinking about how I even sent an email out to few product-oriented friends linking them to our launch, perpetuating the myth. Hours later I would realize that Product Hunt is sadly no more. Gone was the site I knew from my days on Stripe Invoicing. What's left is a husk, active in appearance alone. Turns out this has been happening for a while. Just last year, Fabian Maume asked, "Is Product Hunt Dying?" He's got lots of data and background, so I'll stick to filling in the now-obvious answer: Yes. Product Hunt is dead. And Fabian's not alone. A quick search will reveal dozens of nails in the coffin. I guess that's inevitable when the founder exits and in 2022 a16z merges your mature platform with a crypto venture that no one remembers. But how does a dead platform appear to live on? Product Hunt has a weird quirk where it resets every day at midnight Pacific time. Unlike Hacker News, Reddit, etc., PH doesn't have a rolling front page. This fixed daily scheduling idiosyncrasy leads to all-nighters as launch best practice, and systemically, this means a platform originating in Silicon Valley is unlikely to have its front page content meaningfully decided by anyone in the western hemisphere. Much like with Hacker News, the first few hours of a post determine its impact. Instead, Europe, APAC, and in particular India have an outsized influence. So what really happens when you launch on Product Hunt? Well, your LinkedIn inbox turns into this: None of them signed up for FinFam, even I was taken by surprise. What hurt the most was these midnight solicitors sharing screenshots of success stories from companies I recognized. They'd been instrumental in "launching" apps that I respect, and I'd hoped they wouldn't have to stoop to this. I even had personal connections to some of these founders. It was 4am, but I put on my investigative hat and I engaged with a couple. Here's how their process looks: $100 is all it takes to make it into the Top 5 for a weekday. One has to admit, it's tempting. If you've spent months building, $100 feels like nothing. It is nothing. These aren't real users and PH's audience has never been a source of sticky users. $100 is too much to spend on vanity. And it's predatory to foster a "community" where clout peddlers can predate on a If you're curious, you can see the paid votes landing via spikes in upvote speed on hunted.space. It's not hard to eyeball products which get more upvotes in the first two hours than they do in the next twenty-two. Suffice to say I didn't get any emails or LinkedIn invites from HN vote peddlers, despite HN sending us more than 10x the traffic. To be fair, PH tries to mitigate front page manipulation. They "feature" certain launches to curate the front page. The main outcome is that the majority of launches are simply never shown to most users. No non-featured launches appear on the mobile app. The process is documented, but still opaque and inconsistently applied. Almost certainly ties into revenue somehow. A better question is "Should Product Hunt be revived?" This is far from PH's only problem. They've killed Ship and other features without replacements. At the crux, I just don't think a "launch" or a "product" is enough to tie together a community to develop a healthy ecosystem. The focus on the new draws a fast flow of products and builders that erodes the core community. Alternatives exist, but if Product Hunt suffers from the above, I suspect these do, too: Contrast this with Indie Hackers, which is united by at least one value. Or contrast to one of my personal faves: AlternativeTo, which takes a wiki approach toward the mission of cataloging all software, not just the newest. I guess if this ends up being PH's epitaph I should get this out of my system: Google Glass Kitty has always been a terrible mascot. The obvious choice for an iconic hunt has always been the duck: