I also signed up for Product Hunt 1+ years ago and don't have the ability to comment even though I regularly share things on Twitter, purchase products, curate lists and interact as much as possible.
I signed up for Product Hunt more than a year ago and still do not have commenting access. My product was submitted by someone and featured even! And I wasn't able to respond or interact with the "community" in any way.
I will definitely use this over ProductHunt. I mean, for crying out loud, I signed up for PH just now to leave a comment and the first thing you get is "commenting is restricted to those users invited by others in the community". Yeah, so I have to supplicate myself to some random Internet stranger and beg permission just to comment on your site? Not happening...
I also find Product Hunt to be alienating and therefor a bad overall experience. I understand wanting to limit who can post new submissions at first, to avoid too many self promotional posts, but I don't understand the rationale behind preventing users from commenting. It's especially perplexing because the quality of comments on Product Hunt is pretty low right now so I'm not sure what you're even protecting. There are a lot of comments that don't add any value to the conversation, that say little more than "Thanks" and "Great job!", and hardly ever any substance filled replies. If you're worried about spam, I would think putting new commenters into a moderation queue until they've proved themselves to be worthy contributors would be an easy enough solution.
I love Show HN posts so I should be one of your biggest fans. I want to be. I love reading about new products and I love discussing them. But every time I visit your site I feel like I'm treated like a second class user. I wonder how many others feel the same.
EDIT: I do think Product Hunt will be a successful venture for you. It's a decent idea but more importantly you're hustling hard to build a community, which is no easy task. Most developers tend to put in a lot of hours building something scalable but are too far outside their comfort zone when it comes time to find and engage with users. That's something you're excelling at and I think it's the reason Product Hunt will ultimately succeed. I just think you're making a mistake with some of your earliest adopters. You should be treating us as if we're special, because we are. Instead you're asking us to be a part of your community but barring our ability to communicate.
I am a fan of ProductHunt and look forward to their emails. BUT I do have to gripe a bit about the current very limited, "exclusive" commenting system. I want to get real insights from people who have used the product/service being featured and instead it's usually just the guy who runs ProductHunt plus maybe one other friend or colleague who takes a couple of minutes to poke around providing pretty shallow feedback...and it's very rarely critical. Then an investor in the featured site/product chimes in about how awesome the team is. Not a lot of value there. Both consumers and founders would benefit from more openness.
Just looked at ProductHunt - it's not really in a generally usable state, is it? There's no way to comment, no way to submit new products (even of it'd go through moderators first). It seems that the only thing one can do is to Logout :-/
I'm not a fan of Product Hunt because it's an echo chamber personified. It's what happened to Quora, and I don't think that strategy will work twice.
Here here. I think Product Hunt is interesting to look at once in a while to see what others think is hot, but I hate the closed nature of it. There's no obvious way to get selected to make submissions or comments.
In fact, when I read Carlos Bueno's post on QZ, the first thing I thought of was Product Hunt--an echo chamber of like-minded folks with their own exclusive club on who gets to submit which startup; and not only just submit, but even comment! It's a fantastic article worth reading:
The next thing Silicon Valley needs to disrupt big time: its own culture
Someone's created a "product hunt-like" subreddit (http://www.reddit.com/r/producthunt) that I think is actually a better idea: Anyone can up-vote a submission, anyone can comment, and moderators can separate the wheat from the chaff. Too bad it's not more popular.
I used to go there in the early days. The UI was intuitive and neat products used to get hunted daily. The last straw for me was the ebooks that showed you How To Launch on Product Hunt. These ebooks and lists were like a whack-a-mole popping up every day getting voted to the top. Also how you can't comment unless you're invited by an insider killed it for me.
Depends on the details I guess. I signed up to ProductHunt I a year ago and still can't comment, vote or submit unlike the chosen few and as a result have not taken much interest in it. If Openhunt becomes more like HN where I can do that stuff I think I'd use it.
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!
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.
Man it feels good to hear somebody else say this. I feel like I'm shooting myself in the foot sometimes business-wise by not participating regularly in Product Hunt but I find that it's just not inviting. I don't feel a part of the club. I browse, find cool products, click through, and that's about it.
But I rarely comment as it just feels forced, like I'm standing next to a circle of people having a conversation at a networking event and I'm a few inches outside the circle, and it's clear I'm not a part of that circle.
You can post things on Product Hunt if you have an account that is a "contributor" [1]. When I did it, it meant fulfilling some easy requirements like upvoting items on the site for three days in a row.
I (founder of PH) have the same question re: "Almost all of the people commenting on PH work for PH." You can see the list of people that are or have worked on Product Hunt on our about page (http://www.producthunt.com/about). ~95% of the posts and comments are submitted by people that don't "work" for Product Hunt.
aagha is correct in that we've limited the number of people that can post. If anyone could post a product to the homepage, it would be overrun with self-promotion and frankly noise, with the way it's currently designed. We're working on a recommendation system so that people in the community can refer others to join the conversation in addition to a new posting flow that allows anyone to submit a product to be curated by the community.
It's early days and I empathize with the frustration of not being able to comment or post on the site. We're working hard to open it to a larger audience.
+1 for any alternative system.
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