Doesn't surprise me. I first knew that website smelled funny when they didn't allow me to vote for 3 months and then deleted a submission after it reached the frontpage.Long-story short, it's like Techmeme, where only "certain kids" are allowed to play. Haven't accessed the site for over half of year, haven't been missing anything in terms of tech either. Go figure!

Product Hunt is the perfect example of how Silicon Valley is so far up its own ass. What should only be a website or mailing list that features cool startups is somehow an actual business with actual employees in an actual office. It's one giant circle jerk.

That being said, I never pay attention to "front page" or how many upvotes products get. I just browse around looking for cool things. I didn't realize the upvotes were such a big deal.

Old info in all honesty and some of it is really off. The main thing to understand about product Hunt is that there are "Power" Hunters out there. These are people who joined PH when in beta or are personal friends and have special privileges to post directly to the front page. No one else has this power so even if you submit it yourself it will only be added but not appear on the featured page. There is no official process to become a power user / "hunter" (trust me I've tried). Below these power users are the "makers" like myself who have an "M" badge on our profile and we can submit (not to the featured page) and comment on posts. Below that is regular invited users who can also comment and submit and below that is the lower tier of people who cannot comment or submit (they can only vote). This is how it's actually set up. If you want to be "featured" your best bet is to pitch it to these power users via Twitter / email or hope they stumble across your work on Reddit (r/entrepreneur or r/startups) or social media.

Mhm - firstly, full disclosure: I've had a very good run with Product Hunt, got this http://ad-spend-calculator.qwilr.com to #1, and this http://resume-builder.qwilr.com to #2 ( in support of our actual product: https://qwilr.com).

I definitely agree that if PH is not working "as advertised" in terms of algorithm and surfacing that should be made more obvious, and more easily discoverable.

That being said I got #1 and #2 spots without knowing anyone at PH or even really anyone of influence on PH (I consider myself something of an outsider in regards to web-friends / connections).

I did it the "naive" way, I made a thing I thought was cool and useful and then submitted it. Wasn't much more magic than that.

Also worth noting, we had a cease-and-desist come through over the Resume Builder [it used to be called Resumator, which is what jazz.co are now called] - and the PH folks were pretty helpful and responsive about changing the URL etc.

So yeh, just one man's experience, but for me PH has always been a pretty good friend to my creative work.

Felt the same way since shortly after they launched. Tried to submit multiple works without success. At first, I thought it was because I was a "new PH user" without much exposure, but realized a lot of friends haven't seen their projects even go up on the site. Feels very "clique-y" to me.

Ryan's doing great work exposing great apps, but I feel like PH could be more than it currently is. Not very transparent or forgiving (ironically, since it was essentially built for those reasons), and seems to favour specific people/products.

A little over a year ago I noticed they gave a product a rather bad, incomplete send off - including the wrong url - and even after I alerted them to this nothing was changed. I think alot of people have been suspicious of how PH works for quite some time. We all want a little curation on the web but there is clearly still room for somebody to do it better.

Saw this on HN earlier today, and thought it had some really interesting discussion around it. I know a few DN users that've launched on Product Hunt (Design Details and Resume Builder the first ones that come to mind) and thought it would be interesting for anyone that's used PH to launch something to chime in on this