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.

Product Hunt launches have been gamed ever since it gained some notoriety. If your product team wasn’t coordinating with all of their friends and family to create accounts ahead of time and seed them with some fake activity before they all upvoted on launch day in exchange for a gift card, you weren’t going toward the top.

Also Product Hunt is no substitute for a marketing plan but for a large number of people it is.

“all the traffic goes to those apps” - that was true in 2022 but now just there is not any traffic. In 2022 i ranked 14th with my product and got about 250 visitors. 1 month ago my friend ranked 7th and got about 50…