Anyone following the Product Hunt Drama on X? How do you feel about it?
Rohan Chaubey
24 replies
I am sad seeing makers of our community upset and I can imagine the pressure on the PH team. New changes are expected soon.
Share your thoughts in the comments.
Replies
Fabio Salvadori@fabiosalvadori
Wallafan
It's impossible to run a fair and bias-free featured section: algorithm or not, there's always the human hand beihind it, and humans are biased. What I would suggest is to at least eliminate the most obvious flaws:
Makers shouldn't be able to buy promotion when setting their launch. It is more than reasonable to believe that a paid promotion will make your product featured beyond its merits. Not easy to solve, because PH is here also to make money, and rightly so. It takes business courage to move the PH sales process to the day after the launch, but if done correctly I'm pretty sure that it would pay off without losing any money, because transparency always pays off. I am also pretty sure that serious companies already choose deliberately not to enroll into the promotion already at launch because what they need is validation, and the doubt of being featured because they bought the promotion package stains that validation. We are one of those: got the budget but decided not to enroll until the launch is done.
VC-backed products shouldn't be a thing and influence the featured list composition. The fact itself that a brand needs to add another brand on their launch title denotes lack of confidence and trust over their very own product, by makers. That stuff shouldn't be on title and description, and if makers add it that should disqaulify their product from appearing on the featured list, in my opinion. If you're backed by Y-Combinator and you think that makes your product better than others, you can always shove it on your website/app's hero page.
As I said on another discussion, makers are happy with featured and badges, but serious makers are happier about validation. Reviews need more love at launch day. Almost nobody reviews past launch day, so it's important for makers to take advantage of the launch day momentum to get that validation. To avoid bots and paid reviews affecting voting, they could simply make "Leave a Review" more prominent again (on the /posts page), and show the reviews only starting the day after the launch.
Said this, I have no problems with PH team hand-picking a set of launches: as I said above, you either take them off altogether or you'll have to accept some level of bias. What they might consider is to add a 3 launches section to the right sidebar, called random launches or something, that refreshed every minute giving a minimum featured spot to everybody 20-24 times at launch day. One hour, one cycle of all launches so everybody gets same opportunity also best times wise.
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@fabiosalvadori I agree! The criterias for getting featured are pretty clear and obvious. 1. Novel . 2. craftsmanship (forking a repo and changing the name is not craftmanship) 3. Creative 4. Strong differentiator. A launch doesn't have to have all 4. Sometimes one is enough. then there are lots of things that are red flags. talking about non-existing VC backing, awards, or high profile customers on your landing page. And then you have 7 followers on X. That's a big red flag. Saying 10x a lot. Not being clear and concise about your value prop. being in beta. Being a waiting list and pretty obvious things like that. Just see what other people get featured. And adopted to the new game. The old game is over. And it's not coming back.
@prad_vv @love_ricci3 @access24 @rohanrecommends can you please help me bring to product hunt's attention. I have been trying so hard to fix this since this morning where I have not been featured although am ranking and its taking too much of my effort so truly appreciate the support
@love_ricci3 @access24 @rohanrecommends @sudha_reddy you should write to hello@producthunt.com if not already. They should be able to fix this.
@love_ricci3 @access24 @rohanrecommends @prad_vv I reached out and they said it could be any random reasons for which I was not featured and did not give me a reason
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Removing all products except for the 'featured' (based on what?) from the homepage is totally against the whole democracy of the site. The fact that products which aren't selected never make it to the homepage at all, even if they get into the top 10 products, is just terrible.
PerceptInsight
@roganjscs Can you believe we are number 2 without being on the home page. So essentially and no disrespect to all those who have launched and are ranked, do they really deserve to be there? Unbelievable.
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@kaushik_mukherjee1 I don't mind if we're not chosen as interesting tools by the team at PH. But what I do think is crazy is that not being selected effectively erases us from the site. 10 out of the top 12 on votes today are on the 'featured' list (plus yours and ours). It just shows you the power of being featured...
PerceptInsight
@roganjscs on my iPhone k can’t even see our product listed. That’s the unfairness which is confounding
@kaushik_mukherjee1 @roganjscs Had a Quick Look at your launch. I can spot 4-5 pretty clear reasons why you didn't get featured. Send me a dm on LI if you want to know what's missing. In any case. it looks pretty gd already, so it its probably touch and go. Mondays are very competitive as well. but you'll probably be featured later today anyways.
PerceptInsight
@sentry_co have sent you a request, at this point any insight will be useful to understand what is happening
There was a tweet from Rajiv about raising the bar for featured launches and PH team will "Try" to give update in advance on why they'll not be able to list it in the featured product.
PerceptInsight
I am so flustered at the moment that I do not even know if what I am going to type is going to sound like a rant - so I will try to be as sane about it as possible. PerceptInsight which has so much of breadth and depth did not get featured. So I thought maybe there is something missing. So I went to the documentation here:
https://help.producthunt.com/en/.... So what gets featured and does PerceptInsight tick the box:
Digital Products: Our primary focus is on digital products and services. ✅
Live Products: We only feature products that are currently available. ✅
What we look for in featured launches. ✅
Useful: How practical and beneficial is the product for users? ✅
Novel: How innovative or unique is the product in its approach or solution? - How do we measure this? Our customers call out us as being massively innovative. Is this an opening to justify whether you will not feature a product?
High Craft: How well-designed and delightful is the product to use? ✅
Creative: How fun, engaging, or imaginative is the product? - again how do you measure this? We churn 2B events a day and engage over 300million customers for fun.
Featured launches don’t need to score high in every category - often they spike in one or two of these. ✅
I reached out to support immediately and have not heard back. Amazingly though the community is seeing value in what we have built and it is being shown through the upvotes.
I would imagine the drama last night has some justification to it.
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@kaushik_mukherjee1 I feel this! We're ranked in top 10 on votes today currently, but haven't been featured so we're not on the homepage for the whole day 🤷♂️ -- it completely goes against the whole point of the voting system
PerceptInsight
@roganjscs And now they have put my comment under moderation! I have taken a screen shot for good measure. this is hilarious. Oh PH I have advocated for you in different quorums. You are most definitely losing your sheen here.
What drama?
I've seen bits of the Product Hunt drama on X! There seem to be a lot of mixed opinions, but I’m curious to see how it all plays out. What’s your take on it?
This drama is been happening with me today. Please someone help. I have followed number of times about this but having no luck and our product is still not featured. I have been putting 100s of hours into this release and feel this isn't fair because of a simple bug where we are not featured.
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/s...
@product @producthunt
@sudha_reddy Hi Sudha, it is not bug. Looks like an editorial decision by the PH mods. I am sorry this happened. Hopefully soon the PH team will be able to offer some feedback to the launches and you can always relaunch in 3-6 months.
Didn’t check the drama, can u give the gist or links to read up