Comment by VeilEm

10 years ago

> "The upper echelons of tech"

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.

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VeilEm

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rl3  10 years ago

>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.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10740947

  • siddygups  10 years ago

    Despite being a big fan of Producthunt, I honestly don't think that PH can raise that kind of money unless they change into a techcrunch sv news type site and even then...(which I guess is sort of happening given how they are changing their homepage content).