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Tell HN: Product Hunt is full of shill accounts, paid upvotes and spam
153 points by dannywarner on March 1, 2022 | hide | past | favorite | 32 comments
Product Hunt was once a curated collection of interesting new products, shared to a small newsletter list of enthusiasts.

Today, it has become a pyramid scheme of paid upvotes, shill accounts, and rampant spam. And nobody is talking about it.

Have a look at Today's #2Product of the Day with 500+ upvotes. They are ALL sock puppet accounts, and most comments and upvotes within a short period of time.

The comments are all obvious astro-turfing, with names like "AccountHolder2". Most of the other top products of the day have the same problem. See for yourself here:

https://www.producthunt.com/posts/teyuto-2

Something is deeply rotten with Product Hunt. There are maybe 2 or 3 posts in the top products of the day that aren't full of utter garbage comments from fake accounts.

I shared a link to this before and it was marked as Dead. I'm assuming because the system thought it was promoting someone's Product Hunt launch rather than pointing out a huge failing in one of the most important communities online.

Most upvotes are commercially driven. It seems like something that could be fixed with reasonable moderation.



Teyuto is a product that allows you to create a customized video channel, which is also available on all mobile and smart tv applications! The comment must be original and different from any other user e positive about the product.

They even forgot to remove the instruction on how to write the original comment. What a joke.

When we launched on PH we did zero marketing for it and you do get some nice comments and replies from it. Even with zero marketing we managed to get top 10 of the day, but I am sure you can really game the system with some real effort or by using a bunch of fake supporters.


The bio lines on the commenters are a real trip:

"K". "Be patient". "Jjdd". "I'm a college". "Hi". "simple man". "hello iam hunting the products". And, last but not least, "Bio".


I smell GPT-3 (or 2 or 4 or whatever it is, it stinks).


I don't think it's anything that sophisticated. I think these are real users who are being incentivised to vote and comment on posts, but who have no real interest in Product Hunt, or in the content they're interacting with.

Another big hint are the reviews:

https://www.producthunt.com/posts/teyuto-2/reviews

A lot of the "reviews" are vague to the point of meaninglessness (like "My experience in site is amzing good"), seem confused about what the product is (e.g. one review claiming that "this is great project for YouTube users"), or parrot what are obviously marketing talking points (like "you are not paying $0.50 to $1.00 per user or 5% fee, while you build out a beautiful OTT platform").


What a ride. It might be worth putting quotes around your first paragraph because I thought you were a shill or some sort of bot at first lol.


Maybe I was too late to PH, but it always seemed to be this way to me.

For years, "#1 on ProductHunt" is a strong signal to me to stay away. It means the product is not much more than a landing page and is run by marketers trying to fake it until they make it.


I found it pretty awesome very early on. Before it got its funding round, tho it remained quite good for a while after.

But it clearly became garbage at some point. Personally I stopped visiting when it seemed like a good 40%+ of the “products” were ‘info products’, courses and mostly insignificant curations of other products.

I liked it when it was a ‘dedicated show HN, with some polish’. But it didn’t last. And I didn’t find anything else of value there.


Is there anyone out there who took a funding round and then didn't despise working for their company?

That's my (current) dream.


> Maybe I was too late to PH, but it always seemed to be this way to me.

Nah, it wasn't always this way. I was in the first 10k users back in ~2014.

There are many legit startups and products on there from years ago, when startup product people treated it like their version of HN. At that time it was very well curated, and they had good protection against voting rings -- many startup people used to send out direct links to their posting in their network and then they eventually started penalizing that type of vote.

I don't use it much these days, but there's a lot of good (and well-pknown) stuff in this top 1000 leaderboard [1].

[1]: https://pesto.app/leaderboard-for-product-hunt/


Here’s some anecdata. About a year ago I posted on ProductHunt and a few hours later I received this cold DM on Twitter:

—-

Hi ,

Amazing product, Congratulations on the launch of your product, in product hunt .your product post deserves to get top 5. I saw your product hunt post, it got 23 votes. But still don't get any badge. I am Interested to help you to get, product of the day #1-5 badge 100% Guarantee. I can boost & promote your Product Hunt campaign & also can make your product, Product of the Day #1-5 Position only for $100. After successfully completing my work you can pay me. Increase more sales and engagement. You can be 100% sure that I won't violate PH's T&C. The product will be 100% safe. I hope that you can see the rank improvement within 1-2 hours after starting my work. Let me know if have anything else you want to know. Best Regards


Did you take them up on it? Would be an interesting experiment.


Everywhere where there is incentive difference there are problems.

Why would anyone go on producthunt and browse new products? When I need something I google. But having a vanity plate on landing page "product of the day" gives social value, so product creators abuse the system.

Same thing goes for reddit reviews. If you go to any subreddit multiple times a day someone would ask for a recommendation. Normal user might spent 5 seconds answering "I use product X. Its good". But if I am a marketer in firm making X, I can write long, seemingly unbiased overview, then mentioning X is best. I get paid to do so.


I stay away from PH. And I agree 100% with you.

A tool to create random colors? 500 votes.

NoCode platform for videogames really well done? 5 votes.


100%. This is exactly why I stopped visiting it. The ‘products’ became so thin. They were more often curations of other products.


Not to venture too OT, however, would you be willing to offer suggestions for sites like PH before it became what it is today? I enjoy seeing "new products" however I'm not sure what counts as a high quality source anymore.


I never thought I'd miss "Freshmeat.net" (admittedly focused on FOSS stuff, but it's listings and descriptions and updates were pithy and clear, in chronological order).

Stuff like PH is a boondoggle.


Yup. Looks like I'm not the only one seeing this.

I dropped out 2 years ago despite being on there since 2015 which in my opinion was its peak. It was a great place to chat with others about what everyone is building, with their own hands, but now there are too many solutions looking for a problem.

At least hacker news has managed to keep somewhat neutral, despite having its own share of criticisms.


>It seems like something that could be fixed with reasonable moderation.

That means it cannot be fixed, because the spammers are a billion developing world schoolchildren posting from their phones because some game or app gives them a micron of credit if they post a comment, while your moderators need a modicum of trust.


Wasn't that their culture from the start? All its promotion here, on twitter and and on indiehackers always felt so fake. Sometimes when there's smoke there s fire


There have been posts here before that began to criticize PH for the same reasons you describe. From what I remember, the honeymoon period for that site was about a year. After that gaming the system became a lot more common.

Most 'products' are of very low quality, or nothing at all, e.g. "a collection of color palettes for your website". There are sites like AppSumo where you can buy lifetime licenses for SaaS software, and I've found that to be a better source of tools, because those are somewhat mature products with a specific audience in mind.


Product Hunt is a relic from the 2013 era of internet companies. I didn't realize people still used it seriously. Might as well also use StumbleUpon.


I really enjoyed StumbleUpon until it was suddenly completely changed. Checking their website now, it seems that the website is dead: "StumbleUpon moved to Mix!". I don't even understand what https://mix.com/ is.


It's a popularity contest these days and niche products rarely see the light of day there.

I am an approved submitter there and I can confirm that there are a bunch of FB pages for producthunters to ask for upvotes from one another.


I haven't used PH, but I do have several apps in Google Play and each day I receive offers to post fake reviews. I've never used any of those services since Google might detect their bots and ban my apps. But if I take a look at the reviews most of them actually seem like automated short sentences with bad grammar. Kids apps reviews usually have emojis.

When I want to understand whether a product is good or bad I just ignore these quick reviews, and look for something more balaced explaining the good and bad points.


OK, and does anyone here knows good alternative for getting early feedback? I was thinking about posting some stories to medium, but it's not really meant as a feedback platform.


I was marinading the idea of making a side project with deeper reviews of software, good and bad.

The domains I had in mind:

productrant.org

productc*nt.org

productant.org

I finally settled on productrant.org started working on my first bigger piece and then the war in Ukraine broke out and abolished my enthusiasm.

I do not see it as a potent commercial project, I think I am just at that stage of life when I want to reach "best" section at HN once and subsequently get comments explaining how wrong I am about everything.

Thoughts on the domain? The overall idea? Thanks!


There is a lot of software out there. Were you intending on focusing on a specific domain?


I am debating that myself, I figured I just make stuff up as I go. I discovered a ton of little known alternatives for your typical end-user needs, so probably nothing too specific.

Alternatively, I work with WordPress and ever-hated SEO for some years now[1] and most of the things surrounding these two things is a scheme made to extract money from end-users. Should I focus on that? For example, if you look for "free wordpress themes 2022" you will find that the first page of Google results is all listicles of freemium themes that are years old. Of course the "best" themes are the ones who offer affiliate program.

This is both fail of Google and WordPress, if you ask me. I started a sheet of all the websites deems quality results on this search query and linked together the repeated offenders, I want to use as much data as possible to support my salty opinions. The thing is... does anyone even care about this?

[1] https://theseoframework.com, SEO plugin for WordPress, FOSS, currently around 150k users, operated mostly by 2 guys.


This is true of every forum on the internet, including HN. The problem is 100x worse if there is money or power on the line, such as in Product Hunt.


It’s always been garbage and I wish I could have told the Angel.co folks they were making a huge sucker mistake years ago by acquiring it. But their founder had clout on Twitter and used it to his advantage.


Where do people go now?


[flagged]


I disagree.

> It seems like something that could be fixed with reasonable moderation.

This has got to be peak HN naivete




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