> 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.

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.

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.

Honestly for weekend projects, Show HN fulfills that need for me.

I was a very heavy Product Hunt user at one time, but eventually I found it addicting. There's just too much cool novelty.

A JavaScript library that will radically simplify my life.

A new digital nomad ebook to save thousands of dollars.

A new service that will save me from writing generic web scraper code every again.

It became too much of a time sink. I really would like a 10-minute per day audio digest version.