Community building is a long term thing, not something you get through in a few months or so. I mean yeah, it won't be Product Hunt 2.0 right off the bat, but you need to give it more time than this.
I agree, lobste.rs (which is like, for those who don't know, a more focused version of hackernews) didn't give up after a couple of months and look where they are now! healthy community of highly tech focused news & commentary.
the site is fairly opinionated - for example i wanted to contribute a pull for adding an oauth provider to lobsters. If you think about how lobsters works and their moderation log [1] and invite audit [2], it seems almost beautifully designed for "hacker" identity. But jcs doesnt want it.
For those interested, I started compiling a list of HN-style news aggregators: https://github.com/mikeanthonywild/hacker-news-for-x. I really love this sort of format for niche communities, but many of them lack sufficient exposure!
Here's one [legally crazy] idea: there are some known great commenters here on HN. They write thoughtful comments. I'd think they would be open to having their good comments reposted on another high-quality community. So, could lobste.rs ask a few top HN commenters for the permission to cross-post their comments from HN?
Legally, it would be fine: lobster.rs would get a license, the original poster does own copyright. It's also "clean", if it's done in a manual, selective way. And boom, you get higher quality comments "for free".
It doesn't work unless everyone moves over, and then you basically have a mirrored copy of HN.
Imagine that I was one of those cross-posted commenters, and you were not. The comment, as it would show up on lobsters.rs, would start "It doesn't work unless everyone moves over." Uh...what doesn't work? Moves over to where? My comment makes zero sense without the thread context...which is the case with most of my comments. Check out /threads?user=<username> or /newcomments - you can sometimes find interesting discussions that way, but by themselves, the comments are useless.
If you disagree with their decision, you're welcome to volunteer to take OpenHunt over yourself. It sounds like they'd be happy to find someone who would be willing to do so.
If I didn't have various community websites that I need to spend more time working on, I'd actually do that. But for now, it needs someone who's got the time to run it, market it, add content, etc, and I'm not that person.
Maybe they could try selling it or something? Or seeing if someone from an admin or promotion site would be willing to take it over?
It had a great start[1], but died off quickly[2]. If that strong launch and big influx of users fell off (almost entirely it seems), what chance does it have of slowly reversing itself?
Momentum is vital for stuff like this. No one wants to contribute to an echo chamber. It's not very realistic that it'd regain momentum without major changes or a big sustained push from somewhere.
That said, it's not impossible that it could revive, but it's really unlikely. And once such a drop off has occurred, it's hard to stay motivated.
As CM30 suggested, the "going away" message is awfully vague. Calling the site an "experiment" might be an interesting way to forgo actual considerations like upkeep costs, but the fact remains that this "experiment" ended too early and without much reason.
At first, it seems at though Product Hunt legal went after them, but the fact they're offering to hand off the domain and the codebase itself suggests otherwise.
Would like to reiterate (as I said on the original launch threads on HN), OpenHunt had no animosity towards ProductHunt. The community (including me) had some critiques against how PH was being run, but instead of constantly complaining about things, we launched an experiment to see if things would be better with an open source community.
It didn't work out this go around, but I'm hopeful another team can do better.
Respectfully, I believe the content issue tells only a small part of the story (or is even more a symptom). The far greater challenge was that there was no notion that the audience included influencers, as does ProductHunt's audience.
That single fact creates the value of ProductHunt. It contributes to the belief that what's being posted there actually matters, which then keeps the content providers (submitters) and consumers coming back.
Let me provide you with a little bit of feedback for your future projects.
You had a great launch that showed a lot of interest from the community. I still think there's room in the ecosystem for an open competitor to PH's closed model. But what did you do to capture that initial surge of visitors and bring them back? What were your plans to keep user engagement strong?
Here's an example:
When you posted this on HN 78 days ago, I asked if you had a daily summary email [0] like Product Hunt did. This is primarily how I interact with Product Hunt. An informal survey of my coworkers shows the same thing. We all read the daily email. It keeps us coming back to PH. This, IMHO, essential feature that Product Hunt had Open Hunt lacked on launch day.
For some reason I think you may have added it later, and I seem to recall I may have signed up for it. But looking through my emails I never received a single email from Open Hunt and, after awhile, I forgot it existed at all. Until today, when you announced you were shutting it down.
Engage your users. Capture visitors. Give them a reason to keep coming back and engaging with your product, or they'll forget it exists.
It was good advice, and I agree with you. We added email about a week later and got a couple hundred signups to it. But by then there wasnt enough traffic or submissions to really make those digests valuable.
We should have had it at launch. It still might not have been enough, but it would have been a much better shot.
It's relatively easy to get the "hey look over there!" viral bump, but beyond that it turns into a game of retention with ugly words like "drip campaign."
People are always interested in "new," but they need a reason to keep returning. That's what makes a business run.
(kinda like how, for movies, the opening weekend gets all the news, but not so much the 22nd weekend.)
Interesting. A good barometer of the amount of traffic a front-page HN submission receives is about 100 pageviews/point. OpenHunt, with 1000+ points when it launched, only received about 15 pageviews per point. (and that's not even counting the traffic it received from Product Hunt proper, which is likely less significant.)
Maybe I have to recalibrate that particular heuristic.
Seems likely that the heuristic would stop holding true at the high end of the vote total distribution. As a post that directly called on the HN community to take action a high percentage of readers went back and upvoted. But with 1000 points it spent the whole day on the top of the front page, so you run into the limit of the total audience reading HN in the first place.
There is a similar metric for Reddit, but it really depends on the subreddit. I generally get 5 users per point on a link in a comment. Direct link I get ~20 users per point though.
This is eerily similar to traffic for a site I posted here and on reddit recently. Is there a name for this kind of traffic? Looks like a huge spike from 1 source, then a small source reposts it a day or two later, then traffic completely drops off. My example is a blog though, with essentially no reason to return (posts are months apart)
It would be interesting to have a service where you can put these types of projects into a moratorium, so that they stay in a somewhat passively-active mode to see if any other interested parties would like to take it over, instead of killing it off instantly.
In the spirit of openness, I have 7 invites for comment access on Product Hunt. I offer them to anyone who was active on Open Hunt or would be active on PH given the ability to comment.
To avoid making noise here, please email or tweet me [both in profile] something with "HN Product Hunt" instead of commenting. I will update with a comment once they're all accounted for.
I think the big product miss with OpenHunt was not showing the comments. The lack of conversation reduced it to just a list of links. I think a similar offering or even an updated re-release of this code with a visible discussion could be great. Thanks to jacquesc for giving it a great try and being so gracious to leave it open for someone else!
Thanks! I agree about the lack of public comments being a big mistake. We should have just thrown Disqus in there to get it started. We tried to do a weird, more complicated feedback feature and it didn't really work out.
Actually, as someone who had the same product on both OpenHunt and featured on Product Hunt, I found the OpenHunt feedback very interesting. Perhaps a more open commenting feature would've been better across general users, but you didn't completely miss the mark!
Sorry for the super late response, I forgot about my comment. I wonder if another option would just to have things communicated a little more clearly to the commenter. Maybe some way to view all the comments you've sent, even allow you to edit them. Also, if they person receiving the comments had the option of responding, might be cool too?
Need to spend some more time and effort getting the word out. The one and only time I heard about it was here on HN (and at the same time it was listed on PH). And I spend a lot of time reading up on business/entrepreneurship.
Community building is a long term thing, not something you get through in a few months or so. I mean yeah, it won't be Product Hunt 2.0 right off the bat, but you need to give it more time than this.
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