Let me communicate this clearly for the subtype of HN users who are engaged in some startup thing: You won't find actual users for your product on Product Hunt because neither normal people nor most nerds browse product discovery sites. VC's don't care either (except for self-promotion).

I feel this.

Tried launching something in 2022. Night of the launch, my whole team pulls an all nighter.

Some launches suddenly pull ahead with 20 upvotes right out of the gate. We have a handful. I see the same LinkedIn messages this author cites, but I ignore them. Why cheat?

Once someone secure a top spot, all the traffic goes to those apps, and they stay ahead to matter what. Accumulative advantage.

1 hour later, we get hit with a cyberattack. We don’t have rate limiters on sending invites from validated users, and someone overwhelms that system. All the queues are flooded and grind to a halt.

We work furiously to resolve it. It takes hours to get everything flushed and healthy again.

We ended in 9th place or something.

Never again. I realized it’s just pay to play.

I associate ProductHunt with lots of rocket emojis and artificial-seeming comments congratulating the company on launching. There is usually zero discussion of the product itself, so the whole thing came off as a way to advertise for free. Dead Internet Theory in action.

I always thought Product Hunt, due to a16z investing in it back in 2014, was more of a media engine for their own portfolio companies than anything else.

Maybe I wrongly assumed all these years.

https://techcrunch.com/2014/10/08/product-hunt-gets-6-1-mill...

All you have to do is look at the minuscule number views on any YouTube video links shared with a new product on PH.

I've seen products with upvotes in the hundreds, yet it has single digit views on the related product video.

One would think if there was real interest someone would click to watch a video?

Product Hunt has been always been native marketing for VCs to launder perceived credibility to products they fund, and for PH that's not a bug, it's a feature.

The root problem particularly in 2025 is that discovery for new products is dead as the social frameworks such as have died out for various reasons, such as X's algorithm being very unfriendly to external links. There's a reason that most talked about tech products are for reasons extrinsic to the quality of the product itself, such as their founders (e.g. Cluely). The days of an indie project from an unknown developer going viral organically on Hacker News and getting massive interest of VCs have long since been over: hell, even Launches from YC companies on Hacker News don't get buzz anymore.

Launching is hard. I put my own side project on HN https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45345623 a few days ago and it got exactly zero traction. At first it stung, but then I checked https://news.ycombinator.com/shownew and realized: someone launches something literally every few minutes. The odds are just stacked.

Whether it's Product Hunt, HN, or even LinkedIn (I actually saw better response there lol), it feels like everyone's throwing spaghetti at the same wall at the same time. Pre-internet, that spaghetti was launch parties and press releases. Same energy, same lottery odds.

What seems to work better is launching to people who already know you (e.g. your list), who have the problem you're solving, and are actually waiting for your product. Everything else is just noise.

This confirms what I believed for years. PH suffers from a fundamentally flawed incentive system that, by game theory, inevitably triggers a race to the bottom, forcing participants to cheat. Because if some cheat and you don’t, then you don’t rank. Cheating became a must.

The mechanism in which founders were indirectly forced by the platform’s reward system to spam and beg their networks for votes was surely great for PH’s traction, but the collapse was inevitable as it didn’t drive lasting value for platform participants.

The core idea that the products that rank high are those worth your attention only works if votes aren’t biased or manipulated.

So any alternative would need to get the incentive systems right so that actions are aligned with genuine discovery and long-term value creation, not short-term vote gaming.

Product Hunt died a few years back. Can't say it was good when it lasted.

I also wonder whether software products can be discovered through a launch any longer. Just too much noise and high throughput at which they are being released - once u get past the page all products look like they were baked by clones or a completely divergent one that needs investment.

The launch model is broken.

At this point, PH is more for SEO because, once you hit the top, tons of other websites will link to your product.

FinFam looks amazing. It's an interesting take on personal finance because I never really have a view of my own net worth. And, because of that, I have been having a feeling for a while that it causes me to be "too frugal" most of the times.

Product hunt was always "artificial". Having done a few launches there, I highly prefer doing an HN launch. HN yields more traffic anyway (like x3-x10 more depending on what you launched).

Agreed OP. I could see ProductHunt being a place for product-oriented people and founders to form a community and collaborate (constructive feedback, partnerships, etc). Sadly, most of the activity there lately seems to be people quickly creating accounts, launching their vibe-coded app, and then moving on. I've stopped visiting regularly until the maintainers make improvements to foster more of a community and bring people back to the site.

ProductHunt has been dead ever since marketers have figured out how to game it and "optimize" it like any other search engine. Same as Google Search. Smart people caught on, moved on elsewhere, and the only people left are the other marketers who trade upvotes amongst themselves.

I feel like it died in about 2015.

I agree with this take, Product Hunt felt like it was chasing short term goals instead of building something sustainable They also allowed and sometimes encouraged behavior that undermined the quality of the site

The last time I used it one of the common hacks was adding 50 makers to a single app launch PH also openly condoned mass email blasts and tweets to drive votes which just rewarded whoever could push the hardest on promotion

In contrast Hacker News discourages asking people for upvotes and even treats it as a negative if you do That longterm focus on signal over hype is probably why HN still feels useful today while PH lost its way

The author assumes that he's talking to legitimate vote-riggers, and not just people who will screenshot successful posts, say it was their doing, pocket his money and block him.

If you had told me Product Hunt was actually dead, I wouldn't know if the top of my head if you were telling the truth. I haven't paid attention to it in 6 or 7 years. At one point, I'd visit to find something new, useful, or cool. Over time I started seeing little more than tiny iterations on the trend of the moment, and never really found anything worth visiting.

A thing I find odd about Product Hunt is that I have only ever heard about it in the context of founders launching, through HN. I've never read anything from a user's perspective, no "I found this cool thing on Product Hunt" posts.

Do people really go there to just discover what other random new site launched today? Do people actually crave yet more new apps?

https://launchdirectories.com/

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44668574

That duck is the poetic epitome of Product Hunt. Sadly, and descriptively.

I used to check Product Hunt daily. I would literally visit every link, bookmark them etc. I had actually completely forgot it existed until this post. It has to be years since I have visited.

totally this.

recently posted my opensource enterprise browser on producthunt - https://www.producthunt.com/products/wootzapp-ai-enforced-en...

did decently (but not in top 10). I got a lot of the same linkedin comments with "we even gave you some reviews for free to show we are serious". Said no to them and that turned into retribution.

started getting negative comments https://postimg.cc/n9tDDB0S . had to stay up all night to reply to negative comments with link to my github showing the source :(

for some reason they all deleted themselves (or got removed). not sure.

Take the seo, but don't waste any time with PH (or any other alternatives)

I’ve never used product hunt because most produce seem to be sht or some sort of promotion or a mix. The best way to find a product was to actually googling and then have Reddit or some forums surfacing it.

More often than not there are interesting finds on Product Hunt but nothing that's really valuable

I still check in on PH from time to time. It's rarely productive (mostly mental junk food), but once in a while something interesting shows up. For years it's been dominated by self-promotion, grift, and shallow thought-leadership, and that trajectory always felt inevitable tbh.

It's been dead a loooong time

Or zombified at least. Here's the meat: https://sedimental.org/product_hunt_is_dead.html#the-zombie-...

Is there a good popular version of a site like alternative.to for SaaS apps?

Google AI search makes it pretty easy to find alternatives in most product categories, but sometimes the explicit organization is useful for very new items.

ProductHunt may be dead, but prestigehunt lives on!

It's a tough day for Product Hunt fans. Luckily, I'm here to finish the job and perform the post-mortem with SubmitHunt.com

I always associated product hunt with low quality and usually throwaway/zero moat type stuff. Maybe I’m wrong.

where should i launch my product then?

It's another signal of growing internet balkanization trend as online communities pivot to being more exclusive to mirror real-world communities. Once the A.I. farms take over, people flee.

Public forums → group chats, Yelp → Beli , Twitter → X / Bluesky / Gab / Rumble , IG Posts → DMs + Stories, FB Newsfeed → Groups

Product Hunt → Discord, AI-rugpull bots, TBD?

One time I was at a Holiday Inn at the same time as some multi-level marketer (pyramid scheme) conference. Breakfast conversation sounded like this:

Girl 1: "You should really check out Mary Kay, I'm making a fortune and could use help!"

Girl 2: "I'm not interested because I'm too busy making a fortune selling Herbalife, would love to send you some materials if you're interested!"

Girl 3: "Wow, that sounds great, I'd join you both if I weren't so busy getting rich selling the wonderful products in this Amway catalogue! Here's my card."

...This is what Product Hunt felt like the last time I visited organically like 7 years ago.

Somehow in the early days it didn't though, it felt like more of a community finding cool new stuff. Encouraging people to turn their PH launch into an "event" poisoned the well I think.

I like the duck.

> And it's predatory to foster a "community" where clout peddlers can predate on a

The sentence is missing the ending.

Has Product Hunt ever been anything other than grift?

It's just been grift for a long time.

Lol user generated votes are garbage. Everyone eventually catches on. It's why YC only tried the "HN users get to pick a startup to fund" one time and then gave up on it.

Oh it's just pretending to be dead to get attention.

See??? Now everybody's talking about it again, after it was so long forgotten.

Don't fall for it!

I am wondering why?

OFC when you clearly kick out every successful developer keeping strictly narratived ones... Lately non one cares how powerful you are, you be with progress or be history.