I hate that I have a thought this cynical, but... I think almost all success invariably involves some amount of collusion and rigging and grey-area manipulation. It's all showbiz in the short-to-medium run. Most people don't care about the rigging as long as they're enjoying the show. Somewhere out there there's a 'growth hacker' who's proud of his Product Hunt rigging skillz, and surely there are countless employers who'd be happy to have somebody with that skillset.

In the long run, of course, you can't get people to use a product they aren't interested in using. So hopefully there's some eventual 'fairness'.

The delightful irony: the things that drive people away from some product or community are typically the very features that were introduced (or showed up) to extract value from them. See: https://meaningness.com/metablog/geeks-mops-sociopaths

don't preemptively judge your reasoning/analysis as cynical—it's a descriptor that's used to prematurely attack critique and commentary on feel good stories. if you don't buy into the narrative, you're being too cynical, doubtful, against the startup ethos. this kind of growth hacker, startup marketing clique, "hey look at my aspirational experiment journey" thrives off the lack of warranted criticism it receives

Great point - too often realism is mis-labeled as cynicism by those who have drunk a little too much of the Kool-Aid. It's one of the things about SV that gradually wore me down over time: the constant need for people to declare everything great because to admit otherwise (i.e. accept reality) went against the prevailing start-up ethos.

"The power of accurate observation is often called cynicism by those who don't have it."

Although, to be fair "cynical observation is often called cynicism by everyone" too.

Cynically circular.

I submitted my startup two days ago by myself, as someone who didn't have any PH "karma", but I somehow was granted permissions for submitting products (probably because I was subscribed to a newsletter for a long time). I asked by email if it's ok if I submit my startup by myself. I was told it's ok and wished good luck.

On the launch day my site received literally five visits (in the first hours, probably a few more later). It was dead from the start and didn't get a real chance to be seen by the community. Lesson for everyone: under no circumstances have your product submitted to PH by a non-mod account.

I'm actually not angry at PH. They have their rules which are obviously working. The "elitist" model is working (to some degree at least). My fault was that I didn't follow the guides which mention what I learned. And I think they should give a warning when submitting a product by an account like mine, because there's no practical chance such product will be visible.

Just to provide a counterpoint, I submitted a pretty simple Chrome extension 2 months ago and got 270 upvotes and around 2k visits to it's website. It ended up no. 6 for the day so almost made it in the daily newsletter. It was my first time submitting anything, was pretty much inactive before it and all the promotion I did at the time was tweeting to my 400 followers.

> tweeting to my 400 followers.

That must be the difference (or I was blocked by some filter). I didn't try to make a social-media call-for-action, because I didn't want to trigger voting-ring protections.

EDIT. As for the filters... PH doesn't allow comments which include "ps aux" or "curl" strings. I learned this by studying HTTP responses using Developer Tools, because the error was not signalled in PH's UI :).

Yep, the absence of enforcement ends up hurting people who abide by the rules.

Doesn't allow or has problems storing it?

Any decent comment system should accept that kind of comment without choking on it.

From my investigation it seems that it's some kind of filter provided by Cloudflare, in this case blocking a possible "shell script injection".

It IS possible to get lucky on content aggregation sites without any magic. I've had this happen for me in several places – HN, Reddit, Medium. But it's very hit and miss. You can post something great and have it totally miss 9 out of 10 times. Most people aren't interested in sifting through the new stuff – they just want to engage with whatever's already popular. If even 5-10% of a community was committed to rigorously assessing new submissions, then quality would rise to the top – but most people tend to just upvote whatever is already on the up-and-up.

This "Mathew effect" is the case with a lot of things – book deals and record deals, for instance. Unknown artists occasionally do get their big breaks by being in the right place at the right time. But if you're managing one (even if it's yourself), it makes sense to improve your odds by being systematic, and yes, basically cosying up to the gatekeepers whoever they are.

I think PH is different because it seems that if a superuser/mod will not upvote an item, it will be practically dead. On HN/Reddit/Medium you will always get at least 20-50 views. On PH I got 5. It's even more stark when you count the fact that top PH submissions get many more views than on HN/Reddit/Medium.

> They have their rules which are obviously working.

Their comment section doesnt work. It feels like stumbling into North Korea or Stepford, Connecticut along with some Idol worship. I dont know if ive been anywhere moderated that strictly, with such low insight dense comments.

As a counter-example, someone posted our product on PH and we only noticed when we saw a spike in signups and had a look at where they were coming from. It ended up being #1 that day and still is the main source of signups.

I don't have a PH account myself though and never go to that website, it was pretty bad in terms of design/UX.

The same happened here. One of the mods found our product and put it on PH. We just had a signup button, but there was no activity that a signed in user could do. People still signed up. Who posts your product on PH matters, I think. If we had posted it ourself it would have looked pretty sad.

I don't disagree with your assertions and in fact I think you're pointing out something that's important for people to generally understand. However, It's important to understand that this is more of a _rule_ than an exception. Very similar accusations could be leveled against most anything that's A) popular but not ubiquitous B) vote driven. Hacker News and Reddit have voting rings as well.

I'd go so far as to say that all niche markets have non-disclosed "syndicates" of sorts. Life and wealth seminars, professional conferences, information products people, church leaders, podcasts - all promote other people/products/things similar to themselves who also promote them.

It seem more important to understand this and to take it into consideration when looking at something like AngelList or PH. Advocating that these organizations work against the grain of how all niche markets work seems unlikely to be effective.

It's not just voting rings on PH though. There's an clique of PH friends that skip the voting completely and go directly to the front page. (See previous HN discussion [0]) PH even admitted that this is the case, and then defended it with the standard Silicon Valley "meritocracy" bullshit that there's just no smarter and better people than my friends and investors, so it's cool.

That's just good ol boy bullshit. After I read about that, it became dead to me.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10739875

Again I don't disagree. I acknowledge the very likely truth in the claims. I get why it pisses people off. I'm a founder, I want distribution as much as the next person and being bootstrapped I know it's less likely for me than for someone who sold 20% of their company to someone with connections. Those facts just doesn't disqualify PH as a source of interesting things to look at for me. For clarity though I've spend a grand total of like 4 hours on PH in my life[0], I just don't have that much time to waste.

HN has super voters. There's also a trait that your account can be tagged with which makes content that you share less likely to get to the front page (all votes on your content count as some percentage of a "real" vote). That attribute is usually added to non-insiders whose content often makes it to the front page.

I don't think they do it out of malice. They are design decisions in service of amplifying/dampening some desirable/undesirable effect. It doesn't make the creators evil, it just means that they have goals, metrics or influences other than the purity of their voting mechanisms. Community sites are super fucking hard and the people who have built successful ones have my respect.

0. https://twitter.com/wewals/status/798759401892941826

>There's also a trait that your account can be tagged with which makes content that you share less likely to get to the front page (all votes on your content count as some percentage of a "real" vote). That attribute is usually added to non-insiders whose content often makes it to the front page.

I've noticed for a while now that I'll only receive a fraction of total points for a submission, perhaps 50-60% of the submission's displayed upvotes.

> I'd go so far as to say that all niche markets have non-disclosed "syndicates" of sorts.

I think this might be human nature. My wife told me about the group behavior of a Facebook group she belongs to (women's fitness Facebook group), and how over time some of the women become mini-celebrities – everytime they post anything, they get all the Likes and comments. Human networks just seem to naturally coalesce this way, with power law distributions.

Just to add my 2c.

About a year ago, someone submitted us to PH after I had submitted our site to Show HN. We ended up as the second highest product of the day. I didn't even know we'd been submitted until my co-founder mentioned it (him thinking I had actually been the one behind it). Ultimately we got around 3k to 4k visitors from PH over a space of 3 or 4 days.

So while there may be examples of it being fixed that doesn't mean there isn't significant numbers of startups - with no inside connections - getting a bit limelight from it.

Dude, it's good that you write these articles and I appreciate them. But for gods sake, let them have today.

There are a lot of difficulties in running a community and I'm sure they considered different options but couldn't move forward because they were under too much pressure.

They deserve congrats for today.

Let them have what exactly? The whole entire site smelled like a get rich quick scheme from the start for the founder. I tried submitting something only to later come to the same realizations of the vote rigging aforementioned.

Congrats on playing the VC system, I guess.

What? Ryan started a newsletter out of a love of discovering new products. I'm sure he was very surprised how popular it became.

This is a bizarre sentiment (to me). Success should never act as some sort of temporary shield to criticism.

that kind of attitude is responsible for a lot of awful behavior in the startup community—why should a business venture be exempt from criticism for unethical/misleading practices just because they managed to parlay those practices into eventual financial success? what does that say about startup culture and the rewards, the "deserved congrats," we give out?

Here's a similar case that I was disappointed to see: http://leafo.net/shotslp/2016-12-01_20-43-41.png

They apparently emailed all their paying customers. What a "big surprise."

100% agree and the main reason why I don't go on product hunt at all. I am glad for the founder, but the site in general is manipulated and controlled by people with influence and the rest sit on the sidelines.

Every site which uses the Reddit upvoting model is subject to this type of attack. The correct name for it is a Sybil Attack[1]

I suspect a large portion of Reddit accounts are sockpuppet[2] accounts, alongside Product Hunt.

It's the Law of Manipulatable Numbers where if you put a number next to somebody's name online, then the person sometimes (not often) tries to manipulate the number.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sybil_attack

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sockpuppet_(Internet)

Also noteworthy:

http://www.dailydot.com/layer8/trump-clinton-debate-online-p...