Product Hunt is dead
68 comments
·September 24, 2025siva7
cjs_ac
If I have a problem and want to buy a solution to that problem, I'll use a search engine to find what solutions are available. I won't check a list of new solutions to problems on a daily basis in the hope that one day a solution to my problem will be on there.
Product Hunt is the tech founder equivalent of refreshing your social media profile, watching the like count increase on your latest selfie.
piker
I think that's right in the first order, but the second order is that journalists and gadget enthusiasts do, and they may write about your product. That happened to me with my Show HN post on here.
allenu
Agreed. I think it's worth posting on it but the right attitude is just treat it as any other outlet to post your product. Don't fret too much about it or spend too much time prepping and trying to game the timing.
When I've posted projects on there, I found so many bots commenting and then later got several emails from people wanting to "help" me with upvoting for a fee, it made me realize how fake it was.
gitmagic
This. I got more spam than actual users when I launched on Product Hunt. Pretty sure majority of people on PH are just there to promote their own services and products.
electric_muse
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.
PaulHoule
Also Product Hunt is no substitute for a marketing plan but for a large number of people it is.
rchaud
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.
coreyo
It seriously lacked what discussion happens in a Product Review or Design Review internally (ideally) at a company.
brap
It’s not just PH, it’s that entire subculture of “founders” or whatever you want to call it, that is just 99% fake and sucks balls.
<rocket emoji>
mhashemi
Yes, DIT is dead on. Though not completely for free. Front page is gonna cost ya $100-200.
alberth
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...
mhashemi
Well, it's not a bad thesis in 2014. They seem to have had a pretty big hand in killing their baby in 2022, by bundling it with a crypto startup with a URL that already fails to DNS resolve <3 years later: https://a16z.com/announcement/investing-in-prologue/
pavlov
“Web3 is the next big leap for computing” in the first paragraph is a giveaway for a post that was written in that short window between Covid and the FTX collapse.
The shitcoins are still with us, but at least nobody pretends they’re going to be used for anything except things like bribing the president.
tchock23
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?
mhashemi
Exactly. The PH docs make a big deal about having a video demo, too. Then they go ahead and hand-pick launches to feature that don't even meet that criterion. And for what?
reactordev
For returns on investment
derefr
> One would think if there was real interest someone would click to watch a video?
If a third-party product PR fluff-piece gets me interested in a product, I click over to the product's own site (and maybe watch a first-party video, if available.) I trust the product's vendor to understand and explain the product's USP a lot better than some third-party marketing agency will.
minimaxir
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.
siva7
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.
dustywusty
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.
wiradikusuma
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.
pluc
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.
karolcodes
where should i launch my product then?
tanin
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.
mhashemi
Yep, from a founder's perspective PH is mostly an SEO thing. I'm not sure if it's the _best_ SEO thing, but I guess that's part of being a first-time founder!
Re: feeling too frugal, my friends came up with a name for it, "poor man brain" lol. I talk a little about it here: https://sedimental.org/announcing_finfam.html
tanin
Yeah, I think a lot of people who break into tech have a bit of a struggle to adjust to the high compensation. I still remember back in the days having a convo about how Subway offered $8 for a foot long and I could eat it for both lunch and dinner during weekend... meanwhile the company we were at was going IPO. Good old days lol.
dustywusty
The backlinks derived from PH are generally considered harmful, and rightfully so. It's gamed beyond belief. There is not much to gain from being at the top of PH other than talking about it to legacy VCs.
superasn
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
bdcravens
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.
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).