The product started out as an invite-only platform for "product people" who Ryan Hoover "knows and admires" so it was a voting ring for a valley in-group since day one.

That it's managed to get so much traffic and now seed funding says a lot about how the Valley works, and probably not in a good way. It's literally a platform for someone's friends to upvote each other - "conflict of interest for YC" doesn't even scratch the surface.

I do think the platform has value, but only insofar as that it helps those who are playing the VC game by showing them what a certain "in crowd" thinks is cool.

You're correct, we did seed the community with people I knew in startups that I thought would (1) be interested in this type of community and (2) have interesting discoveries/thoughts on tech products.

I won't pretend there aren't voting rings but they're not limited to the "valley in group" at all. We see people across the world trying to game the site, as people do on Hacker News, reddit, and other crowd-curation sites. As I mentioned earlier on this HN thread, we have systems that help combat these rings and in part thank to YC/HN's guidance, we'll improve this.

I also want to point out just a few examples of products that reached the top of the day's board from non-valley, "famous" startup people. E.g.

- Notifyr (http://www.producthunt.com/posts/notifyr) was made by a 17 year old in the Netherlands. It's the 5th most upvoted product right now

- Instanerd (http://www.producthunt.com/posts/instanerd) was made by Alex in Skopje, Macedonia as a small side project. It received over 160 upvotes and ~5x the number of comments than the average submission.

- Pie (http://www.producthunt.com/posts/pie) is a team collaboration app by startup in Sigapore. It too hit the top of the board.

Of course, not everyone will agree with what's most upvoted and an upvote really is just a measure of interest, not a review.

That people outside of the "voting ring" or "in-crowd" get voted up by a "voting ring" or "in-crowd" sometimes does not obviate the central criticism - insiders exclusively decide which outsiders are selected.

The funny thing is that "friends" and influential people in the business get preferential treatment as of today. See here: https://twitter.com/rrhoover/status/489931085048860672

I'm not implying of anything shady. I'm just saying that kinda stuff is really annoying for the average joe.

Ryan, you mentioned in the past that you were taking steps to broaden the PH community and finding ways to invite more people into the fold.

Do you think involvement with YC will accelerate that step and is it still a (very?) high priority--I say "very" because the fact that it seems to be an exclusive list that's not open seems to be one of the biggest criticisms.

This is a problem with Silicon Valley, not Product Hunt. Ryan identified a way to grow his website and get funding. Smart on his part. Now he has the resources to make the site better and more open.

I tried using PH this week. I actually submitted a hardware product (NAS) that had launched that same day, but this never surfaced on the site. On the other hand, some startups that had already launched months ago were trending. From this experience I'm guessing that most, if not all, links are hand picked, rather than community voted. It doesn't feel right.

I don't know why your submission wasn't visible (you might want to contact the PH team directly about that), but with regards to your point about the startups trending that have existed for months: it doesn't matter when you launched, it matters when you were discovered by someone who uses PH and then decides to submit you. All links are hand picked, but they're hand picked by members of the community, then voted on by the community.

> hand picked by members of the community, then voted on by the community

I'm looking over the submitters' profiles and I see many of the same people submitting different items... so I'm deducing that 'members of the community' != 'the community'.

That's because, like Hacker News, there are a relatively small amount of people who actually submit when compared to the number of people in the community as a whole. I personally subscribe to quite a lot of startup newsletters and follow people on Twitter who post product-related news, so I tend to have things to post most days. I assume it's the same for other people who also post on a regular basis.

People will use it for different things. Some will submit products, some will upvote, some will comment and get involved with the discussion, and some will do all three.

I don't know that this is true for Show HN posts (since it's a comparable product). It seems most Show HN's are posted by the creators. And Product Hunt is the other way around because most creators are not allowed to post there.

How'd you submit something? You got an invite?

I want to be clear that YC has no preferential treatment on Product Hunt and you'll find TechStars, 500 Startups, and other accelerator backed startups featured with as much adoration as YC startups. Earlier this week we also helped promote 500 Startups' WMD conference in the email newsletter.

You're right that voting rings, if not dealt with, can hurt the authenticity of the rankings. We have mechanisms to curb that and thankfully guidance from YC/HN on how to deal with this as the community grows. In fact I met with Daniel Gackle a month ago to chat about this.

I think trying to promote your YC startup amongst your fellow batch members is different to asking the tech community as a whole to vote for your product. Perhaps "founders told each other to upvote their products" wasn't the best way of phrasing it, but I imagine it was more like how you'd ask those closest to you to give you a bit of support.

With regards to the conflict of interest, I don't see this being too much of an issue. Whilst PH itself is part of a YC batch, the majority of the PH community won't be, and it's them who collectively vote.

The issue is momentum: with HN/Reddit's time-based ranking algorithms, the first few upvotes are extremely critical. On Hacker News for example, getting ~5 upvotes in the first hour for a otherwise-unexciting product will usually have it touch the front page, and that could be hit with just little collusion.

Getting the rest of the upvotes and the traction to hit the top of the front page, in fairness, is dependent on non-collusive votes. The issue is that subtle collusion may get products exposure when they otherwise wouldn't in a fair system. (although, that's the startup world in a nutshell. I'm not fond of it.)

I think a lot of this won't be dependent on whether or not the submission is for a YC company, especially since the submitter is often not associated with the product being submitted anyway. I do agree with you about the practice being part and parcel of the startup world though!

It's kind of frustrating for those of us without the 5 friends necessary to get on the home page is all.

It doesn't feel like we're on even footing.