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.