Ask HN: Is ProductHunt trustworthy/relevant anymore?

ProductHunt has transformed from being a website where users can submit and vote for good products into an online army of marketers, influencers and companies that pay insiders and hunters to feature their products on the homepage which is seen mostly by other marketers and influencers instead of real users. Almost anybody who dealt with PH know how things work (let a popular hunter or insider hunt your product for you in workdays very early EST; make your employees, friends and everyone you know upvote it in the first hour after the submission (I've even seen many times on freelance websites people who want to get 50-200 upvote deals for money ahead of the submission, and you will find many indians who would accept this task for less than a couple of hundred dollars), get your product featured in the frontpage and get traffic for sometime and then hope that your product won't be forgotten after that).

Is this relevant anymore? the whole thing became obviously so fake and rigged (excluding rare cases of good products that were featured without intentional intervention) that I don't even see the featured products anymore. Do you think I am exaggerating or think I am right?

Unfortunately, a lot of new entrepreneurs took Product Hunt to be gospel, and getting on the top of Product Hunt to be the primary objective of a startup launch, even if it means gaming the system.

The thing is, even if you had 3000 upvotes for instance, all you will most probably get is fake hope of a successful launch, upvotes will be mostly either by: other hunters, founders, infuluencers who didn't even read the description or care a bit about your product, or by newly registerd users who want to skip the welcome page or just trying to understand how this website works by upvoting anything on the home page and then forget about it.

I don't fully understand the question. What would your expectation from PH be? And why is it deluded?

This kind of sites are followed by people who want to know the next thing. By definition, these people will try a lot of new apps/saas/etc., and so hardly they would be very engaged with yours, as with anything else. However you can get quite some good feedback on specific parts of your project.

I don't see PH to be particularly different, in style and "how to get around the system", than Show HN. The population is prob just different.

For example, I'm personally working on a password manager, and I chose to do a Show HN to gather technical feedback. When I'll work more on the ux/onboarding experience, I'll prob post it to PH to get some feedback on that. In neither case I'd expect to find tons of paying customers. I expect valuable feedback, and perhaps one or two advocates.

Sadly I find that most of the "products" posted are extremely shallow and meta.