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AngelList acquires Product Hunt

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Re: AngelList acquires Product Hunt

#41

Post by aartur »

kaolti wrote: post #32
aartur wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I submitted my startup two days ago by myself, as someone who didn't have any PH "karma", but I somehow was granted permissions for submitting products (probably because I was subscribed to a newsletter for a long time). I asked by email if it's ok if I submit my startup by myself. I was told it's ok and wished good luck. On the launch day my site received literally five visits (in the first hours, probably a few mor…

Just to provide a counterpoint, I submitted a pretty simple Chrome extension 2 months ago and got 270 upvotes and around 2k visits to it's website. It ended up no. 6 for the day so almost made it in the daily newsletter. It was my first time submitting anything, was pretty much inactive before it and all the promotion I did at the time was tweeting to my 400 followers.

> tweeting to my 400 followers.

That must be the difference (or I was blocked by some filter). I didn't try to make a social-media call-for-action, because I didn't want to trigger voting-ring protections.

EDIT. As for the filters... PH doesn't allow comments which include "ps aux" or "curl" strings. I learned this by studying HTTP responses using Developer Tools, because the error was not signalled in PH's UI :).

Re: AngelList acquires Product Hunt

#42

Post by dceddia »

ThomPete wrote: post #28
cocktailpeanuts wrote: post #16

As an early fan of ProductHunt I became saddened to watch their community get diluted and become more of a place for "growth hackers" to hang out than people who actually make things. But I also realize this was because they raised tons of money and was under heavy pressure to get traction at any cost. So I think this can be a good news, now that they can just let go and focus on the startup community instead of arti…

What on earth would you need funding for when you do a site like Product Hunt? That makes no sense.

Curious about this myself. Marketing? Ads?

Re: AngelList acquires Product Hunt

#43

Post by visakanv »

moeamaya wrote: post #25
cocktailpeanuts wrote: post #16

As an early fan of ProductHunt I became saddened to watch their community get diluted and become more of a place for "growth hackers" to hang out than people who actually make things. But I also realize this was because they raised tons of money and was under heavy pressure to get traction at any cost. So I think this can be a good news, now that they can just let go and focus on the startup community instead of arti…

The tough thing about running a maker community is makers don't want to sit around all day to browse products and comment. But you know who does? Growth Hackers. I say this coming from my own experience growing a community of hardware hackers who have even less of an inclination to chat since they aren't always in front of a computer.

You just hit on one of the fundamental reasons why all online communities tend towards toxicity – the people who have the most time and energy to invest in discussions (which eventually snowball into flame wars) are the people who aren't actually doing the actual work.

These things then feed off of themselves – in a sociopolitical 'guardian' type community (/r/atheism, /r/childfree, etc etc) it ends up becoming highly caustic towards the outgroup with everyone competing for in-group status points, while in a 'trader' type community (/r/entrepreneur, /r/marketing), you end up getting flooded by shysters and self-promoters.

The moderates shake their heads and leave, and you're left with the inmates running the asylum.

Re: AngelList acquires Product Hunt

#45

Post by AtheistOfFail »

aartur wrote: post #41
kaolti wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just to provide a counterpoint, I submitted a pretty simple Chrome extension 2 months ago and got 270 upvotes and around 2k visits to it's website. It ended up no. 6 for the day so almost made it in the daily newsletter. It was my first time submitting anything, was pretty much inactive before it and all the promotion I did at the time was tweeting to my 400 followers.

> tweeting to my 400 followers. That must be the difference (or I was blocked by some filter). I didn't try to make a social-media call-for-action, because I didn't want to trigger voting-ring protections. EDIT. As for the filters... PH doesn't allow comments which include "ps aux" or "curl" strings. I learned this by studying HTTP responses using Developer Tools, because the error was not signalled in PH's UI :).

Doesn't allow or has problems storing it?

Any decent comment system should accept that kind of comment without choking on it.

Re: AngelList acquires Product Hunt

#46

Post by visakanv »

kaolti wrote: post #32
aartur wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I submitted my startup two days ago by myself, as someone who didn't have any PH "karma", but I somehow was granted permissions for submitting products (probably because I was subscribed to a newsletter for a long time). I asked by email if it's ok if I submit my startup by myself. I was told it's ok and wished good luck. On the launch day my site received literally five visits (in the first hours, probably a few mor…

Just to provide a counterpoint, I submitted a pretty simple Chrome extension 2 months ago and got 270 upvotes and around 2k visits to it's website. It ended up no. 6 for the day so almost made it in the daily newsletter. It was my first time submitting anything, was pretty much inactive before it and all the promotion I did at the time was tweeting to my 400 followers.

It IS possible to get lucky on content aggregation sites without any magic. I've had this happen for me in several places – HN, Reddit, Medium. But it's very hit and miss. You can post something great and have it totally miss 9 out of 10 times. Most people aren't interested in sifting through the new stuff – they just want to engage with whatever's already popular. If even 5-10% of a community was committed to rigorously assessing new submissions, then quality would rise to the top – but most people tend to just upvote whatever is already on the up-and-up.

This "Mathew effect" is the case with a lot of things – book deals and record deals, for instance. Unknown artists occasionally do get their big breaks by being in the right place at the right time. But if you're managing one (even if it's yourself), it makes sense to improve your odds by being systematic, and yes, basically cosying up to the gatekeepers whoever they are.

Re: AngelList acquires Product Hunt

#48

Post by visakanv »

wwalser wrote: post #21
minimaxir wrote: post #5

It's common knowledge that Product Hunt is rigged, and they will not heavily punish startups for soliciting upvotes (blatant example: https://twitter.com/minimaxir/status/763156319058616321 ), or even paying for promoted Tweets for their PH submission ( https://twitter.com/minimaxir/status/786286705263251456 ) Relatedly, there is no disclosure when an investor is closely affiliated with a submitted startup (and often…

I don't disagree with your assertions and in fact I think you're pointing out something that's important for people to generally understand. However, It's important to understand that this is more of a _rule_ than an exception. Very similar accusations could be leveled against most anything that's A) popular but not ubiquitous B) vote driven. Hacker News and Reddit have voting rings as well. I'd go so far as to say t…

> I'd go so far as to say that all niche markets have non-disclosed "syndicates" of sorts.

I think this might be human nature. My wife told me about the group behavior of a Facebook group she belongs to (women's fitness Facebook group), and how over time some of the women become mini-celebrities – everytime they post anything, they get all the Likes and comments. Human networks just seem to naturally coalesce this way, with power law distributions.

Re: AngelList acquires Product Hunt

#49

Post by aartur »

AtheistOfFail wrote: post #45
aartur wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> tweeting to my 400 followers. That must be the difference (or I was blocked by some filter). I didn't try to make a social-media call-for-action, because I didn't want to trigger voting-ring protections. EDIT. As for the filters... PH doesn't allow comments which include "ps aux" or "curl" strings. I learned this by studying HTTP responses using Developer Tools, because the error was not signalled in PH's UI :).

Doesn't allow or has problems storing it? Any decent comment system should accept that kind of comment without choking on it.

From my investigation it seems that it's some kind of filter provided by Cloudflare, in this case blocking a possible "shell script injection".

Re: AngelList acquires Product Hunt

#50

Post by ThomPete »

dceddia wrote: post #42
ThomPete wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What on earth would you need funding for when you do a site like Product Hunt? That makes no sense.

Curious about this myself. Marketing? Ads?

Well thats the thing though. Angel List got of the ground because it had some solid names behind it, can't remember if Product Hunt is the same. Did he do something before?

I understand there can be things like server cost and development etc. and if you want to do it quickly you need to build faster. But it just seems so unnecessary to me.

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