Product Hunt Is Dead
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The article 'Product Hunt is dead' sparks a heated discussion on the decline of Product Hunt as a viable platform for product discovery, with many commenters sharing their negative experiences and criticisms of the platform's current state.
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Sep 24, 2025 at 12:23 PM EDT
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Tried launching something in 2022. Night of the launch, my whole team pulls an all nighter.
Some launches suddenly pull ahead with 20 upvotes right out of the gate. We have a handful. I see the same LinkedIn messages this author cites, but I ignore them. Why cheat?
Once someone secure a top spot, all the traffic goes to those apps, and they stay ahead to matter what. Accumulative advantage.
1 hour later, we get hit with a cyberattack. We don’t have rate limiters on sending invites from validated users, and someone overwhelms that system. All the queues are flooded and grind to a halt.
We work furiously to resolve it. It takes hours to get everything flushed and healthy again.
We ended in 9th place or something.
Never again. I realized it’s just pay to play.
I've seen products with upvotes in the hundreds, yet it has single digit views on the related product video.
One would think if there was real interest someone would click to watch a video?
If a third-party product PR fluff-piece gets me interested in a product, I click over to the product's own site (and maybe watch a first-party video, if available.) I trust the product's vendor to understand and explain the product's USP a lot better than some third-party marketing agency will.
You can easily decide to purchase the views at the time of purchase of the Product Hunt upvote package.
OFC when you clearly kick out every successful developer keeping strictly narratived ones... Lately non one cares how powerful you are, you be with progress or be history.
>What's this in reference to...? To me personally and many others stating the facts in different forums how their account got closed when they got popular. People wont let it go so easy, they worked hard. You either don´t accept an account since the beginning or once accepted can´t be closed later because becoming popular, nonsense. I know this will be downvoted and sent to the bottom as always but Producthunt, Google, Youtube are history (the new blockbuster). I will never use them again personally (even if they pay me), and so are doing all the others.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44668574
Maybe I wrongly assumed all these years.
https://techcrunch.com/2014/10/08/product-hunt-gets-6-1-mill...
The shitcoins are still with us, but at least nobody pretends they’re going to be used for anything except things like bribing the president.
Google AI search makes it pretty easy to find alternatives in most product categories, but sometimes the explicit organization is useful for very new items.
The sentence is missing the ending.
<rocket emoji>
Product Hunt is the tech founder equivalent of refreshing your social media profile, watching the like count increase on your latest selfie.
I even used to play a game that I've called PH-roulette: I'd open the top 10 or so products in separate tabs without reading their taglines. I then try to guess what they do based on the copy of landing page.
On most days, only one or 2 products had clear descriptions that are actually useful.
I started playing this game out of boredom but ended up learning a lot about what not to do while building my own landing pages.
When I've posted projects on there, I found so many bots commenting and then later got several emails from people wanting to "help" me with upvoting for a fee, it made me realize how fake it was.
There is an anti-pattern in Product Management where some PMs want to build the product launch around making a big splash on Product Hunt. Anyone who knows the drill won’t allow this and will instead do what’s best for finding customers, but I’ve seen some naive startups get pulled into chasing the Product Hunt launch follows by disappointment when the Product Hunt launch signup cohort has the worst retention rate of any of their signups.
You know how we joke about RDD - Resume Driven Development for developers who push projects that will look good on their resume even if it doesn't benefit the company? Playing games like this is the equivalent for product managers
I launched on PH last year and came to the same conclusion as the author of the post. The platform is dead, and deserves to stay dead.
Seems like these days people try to announce products in communities that might use them.
The root problem particularly in 2025 is that discovery for new products is dead as the social frameworks such as have died out for various reasons, such as X's algorithm being very unfriendly to external links. There's a reason that most talked about tech products are for reasons extrinsic to the quality of the product itself, such as their founders (e.g. Cluely). The days of an indie project from an unknown developer going viral organically on Hacker News and getting massive interest of VCs have long since been over: hell, even Launches from YC companies on Hacker News don't get buzz anymore.
Anti-spam teams for a lot of social companies are under the umbrella of customer experience, and considered a cost center. The goal quickly becomes: be a hammer.
The impact to user experience, specifically around casual discovery has been profound.
FinFam looks amazing. It's an interesting take on personal finance because I never really have a view of my own net worth. And, because of that, I have been having a feeling for a while that it causes me to be "too frugal" most of the times.
Re: feeling too frugal, my friends came up with a name for it, "poor man brain" lol. I talk a little about it here: https://sedimental.org/announcing_finfam.html
Whether it's Product Hunt, HN, or even LinkedIn (I actually saw better response there lol), it feels like everyone's throwing spaghetti at the same wall at the same time. Pre-internet, that spaghetti was launch parties and press releases. Same energy, same lottery odds.
What seems to work better is launching to people who already know you (e.g. your list), who have the problem you're solving, and are actually waiting for your product. Everything else is just noise.
But what are you gonna do? Some very impactful projects and startups opened posts here and got 0 traction.
The reign of product management is coming to a close and I can’t wait. I want to be in control again.
The mechanism in which founders were indirectly forced by the platform’s reward system to spam and beg their networks for votes was surely great for PH’s traction, but the collapse was inevitable as it didn’t drive lasting value for platform participants.
The core idea that the products that rank high are those worth your attention only works if votes aren’t biased or manipulated.
So any alternative would need to get the incentive systems right so that actions are aligned with genuine discovery and long-term value creation, not short-term vote gaming.
recently posted my opensource enterprise browser on producthunt - https://www.producthunt.com/products/wootzapp-ai-enforced-en...
did decently (but not in top 10). I got a lot of the same linkedin comments with "we even gave you some reviews for free to show we are serious". Said no to them and that turned into retribution.
started getting negative comments https://postimg.cc/n9tDDB0S . had to stay up all night to reply to negative comments with link to my github showing the source :(
for some reason they all deleted themselves (or got removed). not sure.
That was up until 3 or 4 years ago.
Nowadays, I get the newsletter and may glance at it. It is now full of bots & BS marketeers and every product is AI related which people have put together during their lunch or coffee break. 99% of any feedback is never read, no one replies to any questions and it is just an extension of the pure BS you get on Linkedin.
It has gone from my fave site to one I go to for a laugh at the over the top AI slop.
I also wonder whether software products can be discovered through a launch any longer. Just too much noise and high throughput at which they are being released - once u get past the page all products look like they were baked by clones or a completely divergent one that needs investment.
The launch model is broken.
The last time I used it one of the common hacks was adding 50 makers to a single app launch PH also openly condoned mass email blasts and tweets to drive votes which just rewarded whoever could push the hardest on promotion
In contrast Hacker News discourages asking people for upvotes and even treats it as a negative if you do That longterm focus on signal over hype is probably why HN still feels useful today while PH lost its way
Do people really go there to just discover what other random new site launched today? Do people actually crave yet more new apps?
There might be something good, or at least profitable, in the middle of this slop of misplaced effort, but upvotes and recency are not useful metrics for someone hunting for a product.
See??? Now everybody's talking about it again, after it was so long forgotten.
Don't fall for it!
The idea is still valid though - user generated content which evaluates and provides feedback to other users and producers through which quality floats to the top. The "only" piece missing is how to protect against various vested interests that pull in other directions ...
Public forums → group chats, Yelp → Beli , Twitter → X / Bluesky / Gab / Rumble , IG Posts → DMs + Stories, FB Newsfeed → Groups
Product Hunt → Discord, AI-rugpull bots, TBD?
Girl 1: "You should really check out Mary Kay, I'm making a fortune and could use help!"
Girl 2: "I'm not interested because I'm too busy making a fortune selling Herbalife, would love to send you some materials if you're interested!"
Girl 3: "Wow, that sounds great, I'd join you both if I weren't so busy getting rich selling the wonderful products in this Amway catalogue! Here's my card."
...This is what Product Hunt felt like the last time I visited organically like 7 years ago.
Somehow in the early days it didn't though, it felt like more of a community finding cool new stuff. Encouraging people to turn their PH launch into an "event" poisoned the well I think.