I’ve used Product Hunt for years and always believed it was a place where real community support mattered. But our recent launch made me question whether the platform still reflects genuine engagement.
We brought more than 4,000 real users, received over 150 thoughtful comments, and added hundreds of new followers. Yet only a small fraction of that showed up in the final score. Many of our users told us their comments or reviews never appeared publicly, even though they could see their posts when logged in. That was discouraging for people who took the time to register and give real feedback.
It increasingly feels like Product Hunt heavily weights long-time PH accounts while discounting thousands of real supporters who join for the first time. The result is that a smaller group of insiders can outweigh a much larger external community. That doesn’t feel like discovery anymore.
Support responses were generic and didn’t explain what actually happened. I even tried raising this in the forum, but the post never passed review despite being factual and non-abusive.
I still believe Product Hunt could be an important platform for makers, but it needs far more transparency about how votes, comments, and trust weighting work. Real users shouldn’t feel invisible. And founders shouldn’t leave launch day feeling confused about why genuine engagement doesn’t count.
Right now, it’s hard to tell whether Product Hunt is still serving makers — or slowly drifting away from what made it valuable.
My Financé
Product Hunt is launch forward (we do not plan to change that!), but this isn't the only way to participate in our community. Leaving reviews, providing thoughtful comments, and building vibrant forum discourse also help boost the ecosystem. We want kitty points to reflect the different ways users "play the game" here on Product Hunt.
Additionally, like many online spaces, there is a value in being able to qualify who you are talking too here! Advice from Paul Graham is likely worth more than a remark from a sock puppet account created a few minutes ago. We hope to use this new leaderboard as a way to incentivize authentic participation, and qualify content around the site.
Product Hunt
This update to Kitty Points comes with two big updates, one visible and one more backend.
The visible update is a brand new leaderboard! And it's not just an all time leaderboard. If you just discovered Product Hunt in the last year, month, or even week it could be a bit daunting to see some of the Kitty Point totals that long time members have accrued. At the same time, we want to give a huge shoutout to our community members who have been around and consistent for years and have contributed a ton of phenomenal content to the site. The answer to this is a leaderboard that shows the top users by Kitty Points per week, month, year, and all time. This means every week you have a new chance to climb the leaderboards and get higher visibility on your profile and what you're building or posting.
The less visible, but still exciting, part of this update is that we've re-worked how Kitty Points are calculated on the back-end. I'll say, this part of the project was the closest I've ever come to feeling like a game designer! We also want to be more upfront about what you can do to earn Kitty Points. You can't play the game if you don't know the rules! So, here are the all of the contributions that will earn you Kitty Points:
Being the Maker of a launch
Being the Hunter of a launch
Posting detailed reviews
Creating discussion threads
Leaving meaningful comments
For all of those, content and impact matter. Being the Maker of a featured product at the top of the leaderboard will obviously gain you a lot of Kitty Points. As Matt mentions in his comment, Product Hunt is launch forward, but there are a lot of other ways to contribute to the community as well. A large part of the backend changes we've made open the door for other types of contributions to gain you more Kitty Points than in the past. So even if you're not a Maker, you still have the chance to contribute to the community and climb the leaderboards. And if you're curious, you can check out our help center for more information around what kind of content aligns with Product Hunt's guidelines.
We've built this to elevate and show off the members of our community who are helping us create an incredible space to discover, evaluate, and discuss incredible products being created by excellent people in tech. I'm very excited to see who shows up on the leaderboards every week!
I also want to give a massive shoutout to @catt_marroll who did a tremendous amount of work taking the new Kitty Points formula and making it work on a weekly, monthly, and yearly basis (something we've never had before!) and building a really awesome and fun leaderboard page around it.