I will definitely use this over ProductHunt. I mean, for crying out loud, I signed up for PH just now to leave a comment and the first thing you get is "commenting is restricted to those users invited by others in the community". Yeah, so I have to supplicate myself to some random Internet stranger and beg permission just to comment on your site? Not happening...
I signed up for Product Hunt more than a year ago and still do not have commenting access. My product was submitted by someone and featured even! And I wasn't able to respond or interact with the "community" in any way.
I’m in the first 3k users and still can’t comment. I was able to submit stuff at the beginning but they quickly limited this functionality to some group of users.
I asked someone I knew who already had comment access in the early days (my ID is not lower than yours though) and they shared one of their invites. Each of us from that got 3 comment invites to hand out.
You can tweet at them when your product is on the front page and they'll give you comment access (at least they did for me and a few others I know). But yeah, overall it's crazy that you still can't comment there.
Agreed. This was my same thought. I've been using the site from the first week it launched. I thought it was an awesome concept but the execution is horrible.
The largest problem is that even long time users can't comment. I've requested commenting access for it several times. I feel like I have a lot to contribute to these product discussions and simply can't.
Not much point in visiting a site when you can't contribute yourself and you can't help but wonder how much better the conversations would be if others could comment outside a small inner-club of people.
I plan to use this too. It's weirdly inspiring to see how quickly this came together, how much support its getting, and how the bitter HN community energy can be harnessed towards a constructive solution to a problem.
I share the exact same feeling. Signed on PH months ago to drop a comment and never got "approved". I wish comments were public on OpenHunt.co so I can take part in the conversation.
I wish comments were public on OpenHunt.co so I can take part in the conversation.
Yeah, that would be nice. I mean, I can see the value in "direct to the product owner" comments, but some venue for public discussion would also be nice.
I love these threads thrashing Product Hunt, it is an abortion of nature, elitist, suffocating echo chamber, and a place that clashes with the basics principles of Internet. Sites that started elitist, like Facebook at Harvard, opened to the world audience to empower the platform.
A game I had helped develop made #1 a few weeks back. I wanted to comment on it and say thanks but ran into the same error message. Kind of strange that you have to request permission to comment, even if you have an account.
It was counterintuitive to me at first, but IIRC the idea was there were too many people talking, and they wanted to have discussion driven by creators, or people with at least some amount of clout that a friend would personally refer them for comment access. It spread in/around our local accelerator here.
There's a podcast episode maybe a year ago with Erik Torenberg (co-founder) where he discusses in more detail. He also talks about focusing the communication by splitting PH into verticals for games, books, etc. as it is now, but at the time it hadn't happened yet.
What you've described as "clout" sounds exactly the same as an old boys club. If account privileges follow a social graph, it's exclusionary to those on the margins by design.
Perhaps my word choice was off. The difference I see is that the original comment invites did not go to one common group.
For instance the person I got mine from is a mid-career technical founder in the midwest who's hard working but not rich or well known. Personally I am not yet a successful founder and have minimal connections in the Bay Area. I attributed getting it to being at the right place at the right time.
I've been a Product Hunt user from their initial HN launch and am still a big fan. They've made a very important impact in the tech scene. Open Hunt is an honest attempt at a community run alternative, tailored to giving / getting feedback, and finding very early stage stuff.
Agreed. Initially, I canceled the OAuth request because I thought I had missed other options, but really Twitter is the only option. I don't love that it wants to read all of my tweets. Would love to see more integrations (and I'm sure they're coming) :)
Also there's a redirect through something called https://oauth.io which I've never heard of so now I'm thinking that oauth.io has some kind of access to my Twitter account rather than openhunt.co?
Agreed - that sounds more like regret that it changes the replied-to tweet's author's perception, than it is any form of regret that Product Hunt works that way.
Sorry - reread your post. On first read it came off as one of those people that don't have facebook because it's 'cool' not to have facebook (or so they think).
Or instead of forcing users add Facebook, Google and LinkedIn if you want for people to use social login. You can always use one of the social login api like OneAll.
As the chief complainer about Product Hunt, I appreciate that transparency is out front-and-center, with clear documentation on how your service aims to avoid the same pitfalls.
That being said, it reminds me of another service with the same goals: Ello, who also said they were not going to take venture capital. We know how that turned out.
I mentioned in the threads that a Hacker News/PH competitor may not be better mechanically. There's still a lot of work that needs to be done there, particularly with ranking algorithms.
If it gets to the point where it needs revenue to handle the hosting bill, it'll be organized as a non-profit and the community will decide how to handle things (via ads or whatever else).
> There's still a lot of work that needs to be done there, particularly with ranking algorithms.
Well, that is part of the value of a community/open source project, is the fact you can experiment/test various ranking algorithms rather openly without the assumption of malice/rigging.
Tbh, I think the OP has the right idea [in general] but the wrong execution. [e.g. The jab at PH in the name, rebranding after the initial influx of traffic, no clear strategy for experimentation with ranking algorithms in a crowd/open sourced manner, private comments]
I'm curious how quick they'll note the issues and address them. I considered building something but I keep running into RL related time constraints/problems that make it impossible for me to commit time before Jan. xD
I've heard rumblings that people have been posting their competitors to Product Hunt before they're ready, thereby sabotaging their launch plans. What do you think can be done to avoid similar bad behavior on OpenHunt?
The idea is nice, but cynical me can't escape the idea that Product Hunt is successful in part because it is a mirror of reality, where capital and connections are the reigning currency. If you create a platform where capital and connections are deprioritized, you will not attract the people who have that in real life, making it less useful as a promotion venue.
And maybe it is the cynical contrarian in me, but I think the "real world" aspect of Product Hunt it what turned me off of the site before these issues even came to the forefront. It always seemed like an echo chamber were everyone was putting up a facade. Users seemed more concerned with the people behind products and networking with them than actually offering opinions of what was posted.
I find the more internet-like communities more natural. Sure, the top comment on a Show HN is often a critique. However I find that more interesting than the usual "Wow, another great product from John Developer. Signing up now." or the "Wow, great product. Here is why you should use the competing product that I work on." that you usually see on Product Hunt.
Sure, it's slightly depressing that the top comment on a HN thread always seems to always be a takedown (especially when the post cites data and the comment is 'From my experience..') but the alternative is pretty terrible.
I'm a paying customer of about a dozen SaaS services. I'm also working on my own service. I'd use this before ProductHunt if and only if, it had better products on the homepage.
Basically, if the curation is good, I'll be there looking for improvements to my "stack".
I'd be inclined to constantly reevaluate - if not outright resist - this impulse if I were you, lest you inadvertently allow huge opportunities to pass you by because they didn't have the cachet to signal "capital and connections".
This is a very good (and interesting) point. I'm looking forward to seeing the differences in the quality and type of content between open/product hunt.
That's pretty much it. Product Hunt is not a very good idea but it sort of works because there's some juice behind it. This open thing obviously won't go anywhere because it's doing pretty much the opposite of what goes into successful offerings.
I love this! "Login unsuccessful. Something went wrong: Error: api_calls exceeding plan authorized calls" when I went to log in with Twitter. Good problem for you to have, I look forward to you working this out so I can participate.
Honestly, I only signed up for Twitter to join Product Hunt. That was a huge disappointment when I found out that having an account didn't mean anything. This will be a pleasant change, it's about time.
They rely on OAuth.io [0] for something trivial as Twitter auth. I'm disappointed! The limits of the free service of OAuth.io [1] are ridiculously low, too.
Not defending it, but at the time they launched being able to seed from your Twitter social graph was a jetpack for improving the quality of experience, and vital to building relevant notifications on day 1.
Please, consider adding more options, or explaining how you use those permissions. (For example, you can do what you like to my facebook wall.)
EDIT: Lack of public posting is an interesting choice. It doesn't feel like much of a community. I can see that public comments risks undue negativity or aggressive feedback.
FYI, if you, like me, quickly hit the "accept" button without reading the permissions, here's how you see and remove twitter app permissions: https://twitter.com/settings/applications
You should take a look at lobsters. They solve a lot of the transparency issues that some have with HN and ProductHunt.
"Some other link aggregation sites are operated by corporate entities which may have significant financial incentive to censor or artificially promote the links and discussion that relate to those entities, their investments, or their competitors. Some of these sites have had moderators of popular sub-forums banned after it became known that they were being paid by 3rd party companies seeking special treatment of their submitted stories.
All moderator actions on this site are visible to everyone and the identities of those moderators are made public. While the individual actions of a moderator may cause debate, there should be no question about which moderator it was or whether they had an ulterior motive for those actions.
All user voting and story ranking on this site uses a universal algorithm and does not artificially penalize or prioritize users or domains. Per-tag hotness modifiers do affect all stories with those tags, but these modifiers are made public and usually used to shorten the life of meta-discussions. If certain domains have to be banned from being submitted due to spam, the list will be made publicly available.
If users are disruptive enough to warrant banning, they will be banned absolutely, given notice of their banning, and their disabled user profile will indicate which moderator banned them and why. There will be no hidden or childish "shadow banning" or "hellbanning" of users popular on some other sites.
The source code to this site is made available under a 3-clause BSD license for viewing, auditing, forking, or contributing to. This code is always up to date with what is running in production on this website.
Public stats are available for site requests, comments submitted, stories submitted, and users created."
Granted, the "sign up by invitation" policy also is the primary reason why Product Hunt has become such an elitist club. Using an invite-system to counteract that would be self-defeating.
I haven't actually read Product Hunt much since this kerfuffle, but after looking at the comments on that submission:
> Interesting concept. I like emoji and GIFs, does openhunt support that? 🤔 <food.gif>
This is a) a jerk comment since the commenter works at Product Hunt and therefore is throwing shade at a competitor's MVP-ness and b) Product Hunt is still quirky-and-randum?
It's ridiculous the way they hand out the ability to make comments. These days, the comments are so watered down many of them are mostly useless. "Tell us about your process"..."tell us more about onboarding". Comments are filled with marketers and friend of friends egging things along without substance. It's hurting the site - if they don't see this they are really missing the boat.
That being said, it's sad to see people rip on others sites/ideas blatantly. OpenHunt should quickly come up with an original design and find something unique in their approach.
The democratic element is the unique thing about their approach, isn't it? Their view is that by giving the community control, the site will be more interesting than something that is tightly controlled.
Love the idea. But a positive part abut PH is that I can view the discussion on the product by people (sometimes) more experienced than me, and then decide if it is worth my time to install/test out the product. If feedback on OH is private that angle is removed.
But definitely back the idea - PH has become too undemocratic, and its obvious that if you don't have the right connections your product will never surface. I know people who've reached out to "influencers" on PH to have their product hunted by them.
You're #1 on Hacker News and Product Hunt today with an app whose repo was created 12 days ago and your server is not down. That's commendable in itself.
I'm really happy to see this. As the solo-founder of a bootstrapped start up nowhere near Silicone Valley, things like Product Hunt can make me feel like a complete outsider.
Quick question: PH wants people to sign up with their personal Twitter account, rather than a company one, is that the case here? I never use my personal account, so would prefer to be able to sign up using @bug_muncher
Also, I love the "You reached the beginning!" message at the bottom, not sure why, but it really made me smile :)
I also signed up for Product Hunt 1+ years ago and don't have the ability to comment even though I regularly share things on Twitter, purchase products, curate lists and interact as much as possible.
This is pretty cool - I notice you're building on top of Rails. Do consider using the source code of lobste.rs (which is like HN but open source). It has quite a bit if community development behind it and I daresay can be quickly adapted into the product hunt model.
I'm trying to build in elasticsearch support in lobsters for a personal project - it currently uses sphinx. But it could be pretty cool if you can use that as a starting point.
I will be using this because I think Product Hunt can't manage their waiting lists. I mean I've been waiting for a long time to be removed from the waiting list. I've also been doing their "suggestions" to get a full membership. But, I get nothing. Hopefully Open Hunt gets a stronger community.
Great idea and execution; already discovered a super-useful service, Bulk Resize Photos.
Not sure if this is a feature or a bug: when one clicks on the "comments" line, it opens a right-side panel for the current item; if one clicks another comments line, the right-side panel is updated with the new item => so far so good.
BUT, when one clicks on another item while the right-side panel is open, it doesn't update said panel; it opens a new tab to the item's website, but the panel doesn't change, so that when one comes back to OH, the panel doesn't match the last consulted item.
It's probably not an easy fix, because, what should happen when one opens more than one item?
However, since the comments pane is super simple, maybe it would make sense to open it under the corresponding item instead of to the side, so that it's visually related to the correct item instead of being in a generic location?
- encourage honest (harsh) feedback that the product owner can take action on.
also if the same feedback comes in twice from 2 diff people, thats a great indicator. public comments do not allow that (since most people wont duplicate a comment if they already see someone else saying it)
Those are both very bad reasons for making commenting private.
1. A downvote system is sufficient to catch spammers, with explicitly moderation needed for edge cases. (And those edge cases would be applicable even in private commenting)
2. Harsh feedback is discouraged on Product Hunt because of the elitism. Having comments public will not discourage it. (C.f. Hacker News)
It seems that one problem with a purely community-driven site like Open Hunt is that the overwhelming majority of people are interested in publishing to it vs. consuming from it. Sure, you might browse it to see if anything there is interesting, but most of the enthusiasm will come from those seeking a channel for their product. Hence, the audience itself vs the publisher set is limited in comparison to "that other site".
OTOH, the latter site is presumably visited by potential investors and others who have a financial interest in consuming what's published.
Additionally, without "throttling", you have a ton of stuff featured, adding to the skew. Thus, much of what's submitted has only one or two votes. People are primarily posting and moving on.
100% agree that this is a problem. And no silver bullet solution. Product Hunt actually took a perfectly reasonable approach to this (heavy curation), but Open Hunt exists in order to try to tackle the problem using a different path.
We have some ideas on it already. Possibly some sort of queuing system where you can schedule it to post in the future, with a # of slots reserved every day for the queued up in advance ones.
But this topic will take a lot of discussion, and we're hoping we can get lots of different opinions on the matter before deciding on a course.
In the meantime, pure voting should bring the best products to the top, in a daily list. We'll also give products a chance to resubmit after a certain period of time.
I really like how you keep updating the site throughout the day based on the feedback you are getting here. Also, the suggestions made by users going directly to the creator of a project is pretty awesome. Good job.
Within a couple weeks, this is going to need curated categorization of products. At the highest level, I'd categorize as:
a. physical product
b. installed software product
c. web service product
d. hybrid software+service product
Could be even broader. Or use tagging. You probably wouldn't look in the above categories for performance events, dining out, or phone sex. Must decide how wide a net you wish to cast, and what ontological approaches to use. But this, in my opinion, is where it gets interesting.
Where is the feedback shown? I have submitted "Too" and it says one person has left feedback but I can't see it anywhere (I am logged in with the account that submitted).
Since anyone can submit a product (not necessarily their own), we are adding a verification step (email to [any]@yourdomain.com). We'll have other verification steps as well to make those feedback items available.
Will be interesting to see the quality of products from both sites. Will definitely be using Open Hunt from now on, then go over to PH to see the discussion on the products. I have no idea why they made the comment section private. That's the only downside I see to the site. Everything else I like.
Make sure you guys get a daily newsletter going out asap. I don't have inside information, but I'd guess it drives a ton of PH's daily returnee traffic. I for one know I won't be checking this every day, but I would read something in my inbox every morning (same with PH)
Don't do daily... or atleast let people sign up for daily/weekly/monthly. The PH daily emails were too much. I already get enough crap I don't read, it just makes me resent the site if I feel they are spamming me too much.
For those who would like to launch their own version of HN or PH, would love for you to check out HelloBox - something we've been working on for awhile.
Getting stuck on "Completing login..." screen, with the URL of https://www.openhunt.co/login/callback - just sits there and nothing happens. Using stock iPad.
Sorry, looks like a bug. I'll log it in github issues and try to repro. Can you email me at jacques@openhunt.co? I'll reach out with questions if I hit snags trying to repro it.
Hey, this is really cool! Any chance you could add a daily summary email (like PH and some other similar sites have), or am I just missing it? That's a really easy way for me to keep up with what's been featured.
Problem will be number of posts per day. There is gonna be huge number of products everyday and some gonna buried down not because of there are not good but there are not so visible - timezone problem.
What about a system where, if a product gets a certain amount of upvotes, it gets pinned to the top. So maybe there could be 10 or so products that get pinned to the top each day because they hit a threshold of upvotes, with the rest battling for a spot on the pinned list every day
We'd like to build something sustainable, and to start that just means building the community. Monetization concerns would be an open question that I think the community could decide on later.
Would love to learn more about what you have in mind.
Just the same as google. Organic is what you have. Paid ads on the side or above - for startups who want their company name to remain in the limelight beyond their one day of organic listing.
FWIW I think the name is pretty ordinary. "OpenHunt" just means "copy of ProductHunt" and "open" means nothing except to try to have a position against PH. What you have has no identity of its own.
Take this with the caveat that I don't know much about how OSS works.
I think you should step up and make OH in your vision. This wishy-washy stuff on name, public comments, etc being up to the future community--I think you need to set the standard there, and then have it open to modification later.
I agree. There's "fixing the PH democracy issue" and then there's going to far down the "hippy free love everything is a community all decisions are joint and open and everyone's opinion counts". The hippy path is a recipe for stagnation and failure - vision is needed and decisions, not abdication of responsibility to "the community".
Can't say I see the value in this. You're right now getting possibly the biggest traffic kickstart from HN with a name that you're planning to drop - you have a plan to waste all that branding potential.
Also I don't see any upside in asking the community to come up with a name - you fixed the democracy problem with PH, you don't need to become community obsessed to the point of not being able to make important decisions on your own, plus the downside of the time it will take.
In your shoes I'd get a new name in as soon as humanly possible and even right now whilst this wave of traffic comes in from HN.
nice alternative to PH, i believe its a good chance to smaller projects to be on spotlight.
why OpenHunt is good for PH;
- It will be a PH's moderation app, every nice project can be submitted by PH's trusted members.
- PH can get valuable feedback from this thread.
- PH can integrate every feature from OH
Isn't that what upvote and downvote is for? Spam gets downvoted and good products upvoted. Automatic spam detection can help too, there are plenty of tools that can help here.
