[ajimix]

Been in product hunt since it was invite only beta. Things have changed a lot. In the beginning it was a community about hunting great products and nice discoveries.

Nowadays is about paying hunters with a lot of followers to post your products and asking all your network to upvote your product to brag about how you made it to top X of Product Hunt.

The posting about nice products of the internet and discovering them is now gone. If you try to publish something because you found it online and want to share it with the community, but you don’t have a network of people to “fakely” upvote it, the product will be hidden at the bottom and nobody will see it.

Discovery and community are gone.

[nopenopenopeno]

About a decade ago, I started a few side businesses that I believe, in retrospect, were entirely reliant on a few of my personal connections with associates of popular blogs, most notably Hypebeast.

Startup culture refers to this loss of curation as “democratization” which is a cynical gesture that really just means replacing things like person connections with a ‘highest spender’ promotion industry that is even more dishonest than the curation model. Neither model is democratic in any sense.

[aspenmayer]

> Startup culture refers to this loss of curation as “democratization” which is a cynical gesture that really just means replacing things like person connections with a ‘highest spender’ promotion industry that is even more dishonest than the curation model. Neither model is democratic in any sense.

For a second there I thought you were talking about the crypto and NFT space. Still accurate.

[specialist]

Yup. "Pay to play."

[anyfactor]

I used to be active in various startup subreddits. 2 years ago, I will get 2-3 requests per month to upvote their product. Those requests even though against producthunt's TOS seemed decent and was backed by real people.

Last year I was geting 1-3 spams per week on reddit. They were literally zero karma same day accounts. And those products were hitting top 5 of the day and staying there. Generic newsletter services and repurposed ideas with an SAAS branding.

[steelstraw]

Is there anything they could do to fix this?

[anyfactor]

Worked in a social media startup , want to build one too. My opinion -

- High level human moderation.

- Country based communities

- Actually creating services around the community to justify a subscription to participate model. You can't build any community where people without stake in it, gets to control it.

----

But this comes with the obvious problem of, this won't never work. People won't simply signup because there is so much loops to jump through to say something freely.

[ushakov]

implement voting ring detection like on HN

[akadeb]

so that highlights content that has been upvoted by the majority?

[antupis]

Start new community around new products.

[arisAlexis]

Paying?