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AngelList acquires Product Hunt

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Re: AngelList acquires Product Hunt

#51

Post by dang »

svskeptic wrote: post #26

'Experiment' with no conceivable way of monetization gets 'investment' for some behind-the-scenes, non-investment reasons. Bros funding Bros, and then bro acquiring bro when the first-bro has blown through 7.1M. Its the Silicon Valley version of nepotism. Its all play money, but is only available if you are in the circle. Now that you have an exit to your name, next stop, VC partner. And then ask all the startups pit…

Much of this ("for some behind-the-scenes, non-investment reasons") you've simply made up for rhetorical reasons.

But even if you were right on the facts, this kind of rant makes for a bad HN comment. A good HN comment is one that contributes to thoughtful, curious discussion. Stimulating rage among those who already agree with you is the opposite of that. Since such comments routinely get upvoted, they're a particularly bad risk to this site.

We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13080432 and marked it off-topic.

Re: AngelList acquires Product Hunt

#52

Post by [deleted] »

svskeptic wrote: post #26

'Experiment' with no conceivable way of monetization gets 'investment' for some behind-the-scenes, non-investment reasons. Bros funding Bros, and then bro acquiring bro when the first-bro has blown through 7.1M. Its the Silicon Valley version of nepotism. Its all play money, but is only available if you are in the circle. Now that you have an exit to your name, next stop, VC partner. And then ask all the startups pit…

[deleted]

Re: AngelList acquires Product Hunt

#53

Post by michaelbuckbee »

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.

If you consider them as they are today (a niche site in the tech space) it 100% doesn't make sense.

If you think of it as funding to try and expand the site and topics and community into something much larger it makes considerably more sense.

Re: AngelList acquires Product Hunt

#54

Post by Alex3917 »

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.

> What on earth would you need funding for when you do a site like Product Hunt?

Because even though there are 300,000 - 500,000 new consumer products launched in the U.S. each year, 99% are generic commodities like a new kind of 2% milk or whatever. The number of new products that are actually interesting is very small, which means that there is a very high cost of discovering and reaching out to enough of these product makers to make the site viable.

C.f. why I shut down my previous startup: https://www.fwdeveryone.com/t/-Gk8HmiRSZ-mrUxE0rH3SQ/deadpoo...

It's definitely possible to do something successful in this space, but not as a bootstrapped startup. The AngelList acquisition makes perfect sense, because they can share the cost of leadgen while creating the opportunity to meet a wide range of founders' needs. There is a big opportunity here if someone is able to come in and execute a rollup and IPO, but those are extremely tricky to pull off.

Re: AngelList acquires Product Hunt

#55

Post by [deleted] »

aartur wrote: post #49
AtheistOfFail wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

[deleted]

Re: AngelList acquires Product Hunt

#56

Post by Cbeck527 »

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…

I agree-

I stopped going back after I realized it was a homogeneous group (read: white dudes connected to VCs) patting each other on the back for releasing half-baked MVPs. I was really turned-off by that.

That said, I think it's slowly changing for the better (rigging allegations aside) since I last took a look a year or so ago. I received a small amount of traction after submitting a stupid iMessage sticker pack I built. I was still pretty salty when I submitted it, but was curious to see if the exclusivity had loosened up a little bit. It had!

As someone who occasionally builds silly apps it's cool to share them with a community of makers, but I don't think PH fits the bill anymore. Maybe the acquisition will allow them to re-focus?

Re: AngelList acquires Product Hunt

#57

Post by xpose2000 »

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…

100% agree and the main reason why I don't go on product hunt at all. I am glad for the founder, but the site in general is manipulated and controlled by people with influence and the rest sit on the sidelines.

Re: AngelList acquires Product Hunt

#58

Post by aartur »

visakanv wrote: post #46
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.

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 rigoro…

I think PH is different because it seems that if a superuser/mod will not upvote an item, it will be practically dead. On HN/Reddit/Medium you will always get at least 20-50 views. On PH I got 5. It's even more stark when you count the fact that top PH submissions get many more views than on HN/Reddit/Medium.

Re: AngelList acquires Product Hunt

#59

Post by devinhelton »

visakanv wrote: post #22
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…

> 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. This is the inevitable fate of all communities. I've seen it happen so many times and I've seen so many discussions about it over and over again that I've begun to consolidate my thoughts and relevant links about it on this URL: http:…

> This is the inevitable fate of all communities. I've seen it happen so many times and I've seen so many discussions about it over and over again that I've begun to consolidate my thoughts and relevant links about it on this URL: http://visakanv.com/blog/communities

And there just went an hour of my time :-) Good collection of posts.

Re: AngelList acquires Product Hunt

#60

Post by jonathankoren »

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…

It's not just voting rings on PH though. There's an clique of PH friends that skip the voting completely and go directly to the front page. (See previous HN discussion [0]) PH even admitted that this is the case, and then defended it with the standard Silicon Valley "meritocracy" bullshit that there's just no smarter and better people than my friends and investors, so it's cool.

That's just good ol boy bullshit. After I read about that, it became dead to me.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10739875

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