Nothing can hurt a well-meaning first-time founder of some useful side-project business then to learn that a non-entity like Product Hunt is a rigged game where the inner circle are simply gaming the system for their friends and people whom they benefit from and will benefit.
From "top 3% of coders" to "your product will get 1st spot if you scratch our back with a small slice of the pie or counter-promote our product with yours" to "we will only invest in you if you get referred through an acquittance of ours", the game surely does feel more rigged each day.
The upper echelons of tech sure does share more similarities with high-finance then they would like to admit...
Product Hunt is not the upper echolons of tech. It's a spam site who's founders have in the past have engaged in plenty of questionable behavior, including spamming founders of yc companies with "someone's left a comment on your product, you should respond!" emails when it was a Product Hunt employee leaving those comments in the first place.
Product Hunt is just an online catalog. I've never found it to be useful. It's basically where hackers and founders go to circle jerk each other and hope to get noticed, self declared early adopters can feel important about themselves, and more established goons get prominent placement.
It's rare, but there are some pretty shady types that get through YC. They usually focus more on "growth hacking" than actually building a useful product. Product Hunt fits right in there.
>It's rare, but there are some pretty shady types that get through YC.
I agree, but I wouldn't say Ryan Hoover is one of them.
Having paid extremely close attention to him and his company over the last couple years, I'm in complete agreement with this[0] comment. Whatever Product Hunt has become, it didn't get there out of malice. I suggest reading an excellent explanation[1] of how that's possible.
Being a near complete tech scene outsider myself, my honest read is that Ryan is a decent person. If he were the evil mastermind everyone is claiming, he'd have already raised a triple-digit series B on a unicorn trajectory.
Does it feel more rigged because it is becoming more rigged or because the level of rigging that already exists in the ecosystem is becoming more visible?
It's pure deception. PH presents as egalitarian and meritocratic, but that's clearly horseshit. We need the right person to build a more transparent and credible alternative. They've straight-up lost me as a daily visitor.
> PH presents as egalitarian and meritocratic, but that's clearly horseshit.
From my experiences, Product Hunt is largely a byproduct of a greater scene in which this is very often the case. It is one of the things I dislike most about Silicon Valley, and is something I have tried hard to make sure I can avoid in some way or another. I have been better or worse at it at different times.
There appears to be a strong component of success-by-networking in the tech industry that I have tried to opt out of, largely because I am afraid that if I get too deep into the networking games, I will begin to lose an objective sense of what I can accomplish technically, and no longer be able to personally calibrate for myself whether or not my work can stand successfully on its own. I bought into a lot of the rhetoric of the endless meritocracy early on, and found the wizard behind the curtain is still often based upon the ol' boys club. Deciding to take this approach has probably hurt my career as a developer in many ways.
This type of stuff is why I have been afraid for years to contribute to sites like Hacker News, even though I have been lurking on this site for five or six years. It's a weird situation for an introvert, to want to be able to contribute to a community I have extracted so much value from, in hopes of adding some back to it in whatever way I can, but also being somewhat terrified of getting absorbed into the echo chamber.
Isn't PH just another example of the typical business cycle? Found a startup, get big, get bought out/go public, turn into crap, then another startup is founded to attempt to dethrone you, repeat ad infinitum.
If I was a betting man, I'd bet their daily visitors have shrunk a fair bit the past few months. Who is the type of people who would even visit daily to discover random products that share no theme? Most of them probably are just checking for competitors or journalists looking for a story. Not real actual users. This their downfall.
I don't think this is true at all, and I would bet the opposite. They are bringing in live chats/podcasts/etc and going outside of their normal demographics. If anything it is similar how reddit used AMAs (by Obama, etc) to expand the reach of the platform to a wider audience.
This post makes sense to me in a way that I half understood earlier. What I mean is, I would see the front page apps/services and they would be mediocre a lot of times and then I would compare these front page listings to what I used to see earlier and I would find that the trend is changing. Also, not always the top listing was mediocre, sometimes it was, sometimes it wasn't. There are other such venues and many a times I would find same products listed there too and the their relative rankings would be very different. I never paid too much attention though.
Then they have this - very few people can vote or comment, others can just visit their sites even though they are willing to login via Twitter and in fact do login via Twitter. It is like a walled garden, or a house where you can take a peek but can't choose the window, or the perspective. It felt like they feed information to the visitors (their audience I mean - me, us) and the visitors are supposed to take everything at a face value.
It will be worse (kind of it already is) when PH becomes a very mainstream player of product launches.
(Not the original commenter, and I can only speak from my perspective, having started working in Bay Area tech in the pre-Netscape 90s.)
I don't know that it has become more corrupt than it was ca. 1998-99, but I would say that the sleaze is shocking to people I tell stories to in other industries. Sleazy people are everywhere, but fast money and the apparent lack of a functioning institutional memory makes for easy marks.
I don't know if it is as bad as finance, as I've never worked in finance. I would guess not quite, for two reasons: (1) not as much money, even though the amounts have certainly grown, and (2) the environment changes more in startupland, which upsets some classes of comfy arrangements. But that's intuition-driven guesswork, with some residual loathing for ibankers for seasoning.
These are excellent points. Having worked in both worlds, I agree wholeheartedly with (2). One is also true, but I would add the proviso that SV's influence is far greater than its pure monetary firepower.
Consider:
-Recruiting-wise, tech is clearly in the ascendancy, from the kids who genuinely want to code to the MBA types who eschew Wall Street for SOMA.
-Media-wise, tech captures a huge share of mind. Consider the hagiography of Steve Jobs.
-Policy-wise, privacy and the Overton Window. Allegations like PRISM. Censorship. Social media's role in political upheavals from the Arab Spring to ISIS recruitment.
For all these reasons it's not only shocking when people find out about tech's corruption. That corruption also matters immensely to the direction in which the world moves.
One thing that makes it feel more like a slap in the face is the current perception of openness.
Folks like Fred Wilson and PG are doing their part to give the impression that everything is open and kinda-sorta known, which wasn't true 15 years ago.
The fact that it's still about equally sleazy then comes as kind of a shock.
Fred Wilson and especially PG have created a dangerous cult of personality around the narrative of the ethical hacker.
Young folks in their 20s and 30s have unfortunately fallen for this narrative hook, line, and sink.
It's very sad when you think of all the wasted man hours, much of it during one's prime, spent pursuing this startup game—inspired in large part by writings from VCs like PG and FW.
PG and Sama present this picture of YC and SV being a place of meritocracy, that aspires to be free of racial or gender bias, where everyone is working on ethical world/life-changing projects.
Old-timers know this is a lie. New-comers are starting to uncover the truth themselves. Those of you who live in SV... just ask yourself how important it is these days where you went to school, what places you worked at, who you know, etc. I was at a hip SF bar the other day. Reminded me totally of DC. Everyone you meet, the same questions:
So what do you do? Where do you goto school? Where do you work?
> PG and Sama present this picture of YC and SV being a place of meritocracy, that aspires to be free of racial or gender bias,
I think the bias here goes way beyond race and gender, it's more about your connections and living in SV, so basically people who have worked at big companies in SV and been in contact with VCs or people able to introduce them to VCs. For the rest of us, we're just left out of the game. SV is just the place to be if you want to get a better chance at the startup game, something I'm personally not willing to do. Moving to SV isn't needed though to be successful as a startup but it definitely helps, case in point here being producthunt. I totally agree though that producthunt (and others) should be more transparent, this really makes them look bad and frustrates the community.
>It's very sad when you think of all the wasted man hours, much of it during one's prime, spent pursuing this startup game—
Speaking from first hand experience: after a while you kind of realize that even if you succeed, you'd have ended up far more wealthy in any true sense of the word had you instead lived those years to their fullest rather than having followed the startup path.
I'm not saying that PG has built a cult of personality around himself, but rather around the narrative of the ethical, hard-working, pull your own bootstraps, outsider hacker hero.
The point is not whether PG actively set out to build a cult of personality. The point is that it exists today. I tend to agree with the GP comment about PG's gaseous emissions.
That's exactly the point I was making (that is, not agreeing with the "built a cult of personality" part someone said at the top of this thread but pointing out that it exists anyway and the consequences are the same either way)
It's always been rigged and it always will be, so long as there is a significant amount of money involved and people act as they have for millenia. The problem is that we keep letting them make us forget this, and when we don't remember this we can't act to mitigate the problem in whatever ways we can.
Silicon Valley has definitely become more of an insider's game. Just look at the recent crop of VCs whose primary credential is membership in the Lucky Sperm Club. Pretty soon, 'society' bs will pick winners as much as talent and hard work.
This is somewhat true. There are far more former founders in the VC ranks than 15-20-30 years ago when it was dominated by old-crust finance, old money types.
That said, the vast majority of the new incoming class of VCs (think associates, VPs, etc.) are mostly freshly minted MBAs with 2-3 years of post college experience, typically spent at a management consultancy, investment bank (or related prestigious front-office work at PEs, HFs, etc.), or in corporate strategy for a F500.
These people are definitely smart, with great pedigrees from the best schools. I'm just not sure they know a damn thing about the nitty gritty work of building a company. These are people who sat in boardrooms hunched over excel models and used to scheduling a million meetings to discuss strategy. Not rolling up their sleeves and executing.
I say all of this as someone with this background and with many peers who fit this mold.
From "top 3% of coders" to "your product will get 1st spot if you scratch our back with a small slice of the pie or counter-promote our product with yours" to "we will only invest in you if you get referred through an acquittance of ours", the game surely does feel more rigged each day.
The upper echelons of tech sure does share more similarities with high-finance then they would like to admit...