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.
Hey guys, for all the entrepreneurs out there and products owners, in case you want to submit your work to Product Hunt, let me know because I have a few invites.. Email me: moadmohssin@gmail.com
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...
This doesn't surprise me. Product Hunt is largely successful because of its community. That didn't happen by accident, Ryan Hoover, the face of PH, puts a lot of effort into curating the community.
OpenHunt on the other hand was just a technical solution to a problem that was mildly annoying for some PH users. And guess what, PH just opened its gates. I got an "invite" this week to become an active contributor, without even asking for one. Thank OH for this, I'm sure they forced PH to make the decision much quicker.
Open it up to everyone, that's how you can make it more inclusive.
edit: The invite-only thing is incredibly lame. I signed up a few minutes ago to see what product hunt was all about because it was being discussed in this thread (never heard of it before). I doubt I'll lose any sleep over forgetting its existence.
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 was fortunate enough to have a friend invite me ~2 months ago. I've not received any invites in that time though. Apparently they're distributed based on engagement with ProductHunt itself. I might check it every other day, hunt a few things I find (mostly local startups), but very rarely comment on anything. So I suspect I don't fit their model of "active user" and so I don't get invites.
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.
To seed the community with thoughtful discussion and quality content, Product Hunt is limited to a few select contributors while in beta. Invites will become available as the product and community mature.
Product Hunt seems like it's pretty hard to post without knowing someone else who will invite you as you can't comment or post without being invited, JUST upvote. Is there any way to get in at least semi-easily?
My comment, since there is a nonzero chance of it getting downvoted/deleted on PH:
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Hi Ryan & the Product Hunt team.
As the person who wrote the Most-Recommended comment on your Medium article with 100+ Recommends, believe me when I say there is a large amount of external interest in the topics of the questions I now ask about Product Hunt.
My questions are simple:
1. What changes, if any, have you made in response to the June Re/Code article accusing Product Hunt of being elitist?
2. You said "all upvotes are equal" in the Medium article as evidence that Product Hunt is fair. Would you say that the binary process of get-on-homepage/do-not-get-on-homepage is just as fair?
3. Whenever someone on Product Hunt upvotes a product, their friends receive a notification saying "X and Y others upvoted Z" with a link to Z. Does this call-to-action skew the upvoting process in favor of people with strong social groups on PH?
4. Do you believe that the current product curation process is meritocratic, that is the best products, on their individual merit, are the ones that are on the front page?
5. As a hypothetical maker trying to get my product onto Product Hunt, would my time be better spent Tweeting and chatting on Slack with Top Hunters or by improving the product itself?
6. Do makers who schedule exclusive launches with the Product Hunt team and offer PH-specific perks get favorable treatment in terms of ranking/exposure? Would this be considered a "conflict of interest"?
7. The new "conflicts of interest" section of the FAQ notes that they should be disclosed in good faith. In the case where a conflict of interest is blatant, such as when a venture capitalist submits a startup they funded (as an casual observer, I notice this happens all the time), are you willing to penalize the investor/submission and force disclosure?
Suddenly, Product Hunt invites are becoming a hot commodity around my cycle. Is a market developing soon ? So far, a few founder I know basically send invites to their supporter so that they can vote for her own products. It does not make much sense to me.
It's true many of my startup friends are on Product Hunt. I trust that they will add useful contributions to the site because I know them. But the majority of the people (95%+) aren't my "friends" per se. The community has grown largely by referrals of existing community members and founders who's products have been submitted at some point.
I recognize the frustration some people have in not being able to contribute but the product as it's designed right now, will not scale if it's completely open to the public. We're implementing some changes in the coming weeks to prepare for this.
Again, I don't want anyone to feel "excluded" and are making a concerted effort to grow the community carefully. In the meantime, please add your name here and we'll send you a note once it's opened up: http://bit.ly/ph-contributor :)
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!
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 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.
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.
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