[iEchoic]

(I do like ProductHunt, so don't take this as an attack on the product)

PH allows anyone to find and vote on anything, and has a follower model that gives hunters with many followers much more exposure. The result of this is that hunters with lots of followers are a lot more effective at getting products attention, as are makers that aggressively market their PH submission, irregardless of the product's merits. Because these mechanics aren't interest-targeted, PH also heavily favors highly-general/mass-market products.

Just brainstorming, but I'd be interested in seeing if a product that eliminates this factor could be better at evaluating products purely on their merits. Maybe you select a couple topics that you're knowledgeable about, and each day you get a small, randomly-allocated batch of products in that topic that you can rate on a five-star scale (as opposed to an approval/participation scale)? In this model, there's no directed way to influence a particular product, the smaller number of products makes it easier to spend more time on each product, and all reviews would be done by people in their area of expertise. It'd probably be best to normalize the number of ratings on each products, to control for varying levels of participation and exposure. This would probably need to run on a rolling weekly model instead of a daily model.

I suspect that marketing this would be more challenging, since this also removes the incentive for makers and hunters to promote the site for votes. It'd probably be better at evaluating products purely on their merits, but I don't know if that's something the world needs enough to be self-sustainable.