Re:Let’s continue to build Product Hunt, together
by thetmkay on Tuesday December 22, 2015 @05:53AM
(#10776963)
I think PH suffers from an identity crisis.
It started off as a curated newsletter and became a portal. It never fully embraced a community-driven approach (as evidenced by their opaque curation policy) nor a pivot to a more search engine/yelp-like community. In essence, they have yet to conquer their scalability problem: how to maintain quality while increasing quantity of products. It's a bloomin' hard problem to be fair to them.
What I am most disappointed by is that with network effects, it is beneficial for a community as a whole to have one dominant portal. The one thing you want for a dominant community platform is transparency (there's an argument for decentralization too), a requirement that has yet to be met.
It started off as a curated newsletter and became a portal. It never fully embraced a community-driven approach (as evidenced by their opaque curation policy) nor a pivot to a more search engine/yelp-like community. In essence, they have yet to conquer their scalability problem: how to maintain quality while increasing quantity of products. It's a bloomin' hard problem to be fair to them.
What I am most disappointed by is that with network effects, it is beneficial for a community as a whole to have one dominant portal. The one thing you want for a dominant community platform is transparency (there's an argument for decentralization too), a requirement that has yet to be met.