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.

It's a really weird time we're living in now. I could at least tell 10 years ago a launch would get often times buzz primarily because of the quality of the product. Nowadays the coin has flipped - the buzz is usually about anything else but the actual product.

I couldn't imagine a better way to describe the current concept of grassroots marketing. Spam, and frankly heavy-handed and bad ways to resolve it (no links get traction, etc) have effectively closed the door here.

Anti-spam teams for a lot of social companies are under the umbrella of customer experience, and considered a cost center. The goal quickly becomes: be a hammer.

The impact to user experience, specifically around casual discovery has been profound.