Product Hunt Is in Current Y Combinator Batch

Re:Product Hunt Is in Current Y Combinator Batch by rrhoover on Thursday July 17, 2014 @12:54PM (#8048650)

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.

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Re:Product Hunt Is in Current Y Combinator Batch by julespitt on Thursday July 17, 2014 @08:15PM (#8051007)

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.

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Re:Product Hunt Is in Current Y Combinator Batch by xpose2000 on Friday July 18, 2014 @04:02PM (#8055274)

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.

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Re:Product Hunt Is in Current Y Combinator Batch by aagha on Friday July 18, 2014 @03:28AM (#8052046)

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.

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