Show HN: I built a fair alternative to Product Hunt for indie makers

Love it! I think you’ve got something here.

The one thing to solve for imo is the initial attraction needs to be incentivized for being the early set in of users/contributors to arrive. On that note, make it possible for me as a product recommender to recommend someone else’s product if I want to, and that can be a separate bucket for recommendations.

Then what you have now is essentially digg and Reddit but for startups. It submission will be slow on day one, but hopefully ppl stick around if you capture their imagination and plant a seed for them to come back for.

A second tab by other recommendations by the user will always be buzzing as people will naturally want to hack their chances into being promoted to the LIST on the first tab and/or by being promoted, or feeling good about it, or helping a friend etc and the recommending submitter gets points that can be used for launching their own product and with greater placement or give them one vote for every 10 votes their reco gets on the other tab.

Anyway, I’m riffing but I’m also taking a break from working on a stratplan for my startup and winding down on the couch.

Love the simplicity. PH sold out.

P.s. instead of votes, give people satoshis’ and use as an opp to on-ramp more people onto crypto.

I get your point. The focus should definitely be on the product itself. The reason platform reward engaged users is often to build a supportive community around those products. Active users help promote, review and discuss products, which can give them the attention they deserve.

But I agree- it's important to make sure the product is always the main focus. Thanks for sharing your thoughts.

I like that you show the website stats. For an indie maker, we care about reach a lot. The transparency is important I think.

If you care fairness, I have 1 extra suggestion that you might be interested in.

It was proven by several data-science research that when users have to votes (or give ratings) and if they are able to see the previous result, then the first few votes have an extremely important effect.

For instance here is one stury, very well written article by a famous teacher Robert West, "of sheep and beer" https://dlab.epfl.ch/2017-08-30-of-sheep-and-beer/ which describes this effect on beer-rating sites.

One way to overcome this effect is to hide the votes until enough votes were collected (eg more than 50). Another way is to hide votes until you have voted yourself.

Looking cool! I have two questions though:

>10 launches per day, max.

What if your launch queue will be filling at a much faster rate aka backpressure issue? E.g what if this went viral and you get 1000 new projects per day, any new launch is scheduled after three months then?

>2 votes per user, per day.

Any idea how to prevent someone from creating 10 fake accounts and making it 20 votes per day? I'm sure any entrepreneur will see this opportunity right away if a little cheating means more exposure.

Looks like a good alternative to product hunt, the UI is looking fresh and I like it, however I'm genuinely interested about your thoughts on the problems this model can have at scale.