2 comments here really matched my opinion.
> a lot of new entrepreneurs took Product Hunt to be gospel .
This is true. I've been in the PH community for 2-3 years, posted a bunch of products, some frontpaging some not. Problem is that now if you post a product that you found and think is cool you might see founders being angry at you because "they were planning for a PH launch and you ruined it!". I've had moments like that where they'd message me asking to delete their product or telling me I shouldn't have posted their product because they were planning for it. Such bullshit.
and
>PH suffers from the fact there are only 1-2 actual useful online products released per week.
True. Lately products have been in 4 categories: "Collection of links to X", "Guide to Y", "Clone of Z" and "New product by a popular company".
Also, the community became kinda shit.
A lot of people won't say anything bad about a product. I saw a product that was made by a "meta-influencer" (eg someone who made a bunch of kinda useless products but that was the reason he was popular in the community) and it was terrible - the UI sucked, the privacy settings were terrible and it broke all the rules of making a quality mobile app. I commented on this stuff and nobody really cared, while comments praising him were at the top saying the app was amazing (it was not. it was basic, terrible and broken in many places). There are a lot of products like that that are shitty or useless, but people still praise them because what was once a "positive but critical community" turned into a "toxic positivity community" that is afraid to call out people on their shit.