Inauthenticity of Product Hunt

@teddy_atkins That's a really hard problem to solve. Sam Parr, founder of The Hustle, and now Hampton, a community for CEOs, has been working on developing communities for years. He says communities are especially hard to build, and leaders should be wary of who joins - because any member is a value add or value subtract. The culture of the community builds itself, and if it goes too awry "you should just start over". Andrew Chen, general partner at a16z and author of The Cold Start Problem, says that there is always going to be a 'hard side' of a 2-way, 3-way, marketplace to bring in. Who are the main users of product hunt, and what are they looking for? We'll get back to Andrew later. - All kinds of founders at different stages launching their product - Early adopters looking to try new products So where's the problem? Let's talk about tinder, a common network app. Tinder today has many more men than women. Generally, women can afford to be selective, and generally men have to "spray and pray". In it's early days Tinder was exclusive to attendees of college parties - frats and sorority members; back then there was a rough 50/50 population and the founders were surprised to see people on tinder for a few hours a day on average! Back then the community was small and concentrated. Product hunt's base of founders are like the men who are looking to attract early adopters and "spray and pray". On tinder, it's the men who will be judged more by features that make them attractive. On Product Hunt it's the founder's copywriting to get upvotes and bring in users, and it seems as though they're attracting mostly the same "gender", or user group to do that now. Andrew Chen states that there's an S curve associated with building networks. You start small, and grow exponentially, but as the network gets larger the value decreases and people leave. A modern day example is someone being fed up with trash posts in their feeds on social media. At some point the network feels too large and it gets overwhelming for people, so the company will try to reduce the appearance of it's size by curating content to the user, creating categories, etc, creating private groups, etc. - this way the company can still grow. In conclusion, building a network is extremely hard. It's one of the hardest kinds of businesses to develop. How does tinder solve their problem of quality over quantity today? They don't, they've actually leaned into it with the pricing plans that mostly men are buying to meet even more women. If ProductHunt's goal is to promote genuine discussion, then it must lean into the interests of the people who want to promote their product, but do so in a way that incentivizes authenticity. Right now many people are rewarded for plugging their links in every comment section. It's not the people's fault, it's how ProductHunt designed their website to be. However, I would urge ProductHunt to focus on this problem because it WILL devalue what it means to be #1 product of the week. This community needs to see an influx of early adopters, and maybe be more selective about who can post a product. Maybe a review process, maybe you have to be at a certain stage, sent a certain number of comments, upvoted a certain number of times, be followed by a number of people, send 10,000 words. Whatever needs to be done to balance out the number of founders and the number of genuine early adopters