Rather than insight, the post you're replying to shows a lack of imagination.

Just off the top of my head, I ask myself how much revenue TechCrunch pulls in, and what it originally started as - and I can see a path for PH to become a 'real' (as in meaningful, sustainable revenue) company. Just because it isn't full of whizbang tech doesn't mean it can't make plenty of money and be valuable to other properties.

And that's just with 20 seconds of thought put into it. I'm sure there are many other angles as well.

TechCrunch was WAY more popular that ProductHunt ever will be, was in a different and more frothy media landscape, had a very real and lucrative sub-business called the TC Disrupt conference (which I hear accounted for something like 75% of TechCrunch profits at the time) and still was acquired for only about $25-40MM, depending on who you ask.

Which makes this PH acquisition even more of a head scratcher.

Care to share how? I don't have a dog in the fight but the onus is on you since you're saying there is path to significant monetization.

Possibility and strategy are totally different animals. The fact is it is really hard to monetize a directory of things when you are not a party to the transaction.

The not-sexy model of charging businesses for exposure and leads works (see http://www.capterra.com/) but is probably not nearly rich enough to satisfy Product Hunt's VCs.

Hmm...only number I could find is $2.4mm in revenue back in 2007

>uncritical adoration

Really? Hacker News comments are uncritical adoration?

I'd weight the cynicism and perma-contrarianism a tad bit higher.

In fact, I believe the success of a startup is inversely proportional to the amount of hate it gets in HN comments.

Theranos excluded from the sample, of course.

such...irony

> The general tone here can at times feel like an uncritical adoration of the valley ecosystem

This is a classic perceptual bias. Everyone feels like HN is full of whatever they identify against, because those are the things we notice the most. Since you identify against "the valley ecosystem", HN seems full of uncritical adoration for it. It's a mirror of your own preferences.

There's also the enormous home-team advantage that anything "anti" has in the human brain, which gives rise to all the snark, cynicism, and rage-fests that take over online communities by default.

This is fascinating. I want to turn as many of my biases as possible from unknowns to knowns, so I appreciate you pointing this out.

An exercise I've now decided to undertake is as follows:

Every time I see something that I feel is "uncritical adoration" I will challenge myself to look for evidence for the opposite of that in the same thread. I'll start with HN, but if this works I want to extend that elsewhere.

Well, you made my evening by actually getting that particular point and finding it interesting. That is so rare! And it's such an interesting phenomenon.

I stumbled on this because the moderation job involves reading tons of comments I wouldn't otherwise see, and the various descriptions of HN they contain are quite incompatible. But they all fit the pattern described above.

I'm glad it gives you faith, because for me it does the opposite. It makes me long for the days where people in this community took an open mind and could entertain the idea that they might not know everything about everything.

I think there are some very smart comments here about the toxicity of internet communities over time that, unfortunately, seem to be evidenced in this exact conversation.

Having opposing viewpoints discuss topics gives me faith.

A comment that is on top does not mean every one shares the sentiment. I usually upvote comments I strongly disagree with and add my own thoughts with the attempt to rectify the line of thinking. The idea is if something is "very" wrong then all the more reason to upvote and enlighten others.

I usually see nothing but negativity on here so I can't relate at all. The top comment was exactly what I expected when opening the thread.