Building a community these days is no longer just about setting up a social media profile or starting a private group on Slack or Discord.

Companies need to differentiate themselves, gain a competitive advantage, and build relationships with clients/users on a more personal level.

Every day, after launching, makers are contacted on LinkedIn and X by people offering to sell votes. As the Product Hunt team, we are very much aware of this and really hate it. We have systems in place to neutralize this type of gaming. Every vote counts for a different number of points on Product Hunt. A couple examples:

• An account with a recently created gmail address and no history of quality contributions on Product Hunt: this vote will count for 0 points. Yes, this might be a well intentioned user, but we take a conservative approach to protect the community. If the account has a company email or applies for verification on Product Hunt, that's a different story.

• An account with a company email address linked to a legitimate LinkedIn account with a history of meaningful contributions on Product Hunt: this vote carries significant weight.

A couple questions for the community:

• Are there specific accounts on Product Hunt that you suspect participate in vote selling? You can reply here or email report@producthunt.co

• What would you want to see us do differently here?