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“We know no one asked for this but weird stuff is what makes the internet beautiful.”

We couldn’t agree more! The team at humit launched WeirdSpot.fyi today, a fun tool to turn silly one-liners into playlists. What started as a side project by an intern looking to stand out to a crush snowballed into something more, explained maker Prithvi Sankar.

The side project sits alongside humit, a social networking app for community-driven (as opposed to algorithm-driven) music discovery that launched last year. Describing itself as “the love child of Spotify and Reddit,” hummit provides social features that Spotify doesn’t, like sharing 30-second snippets, dashboard stats, and subreddit-like forums.

The app works with Spotify through a seamless integration, which is great because the streaming giant has been hustling to become “the world’s number one audio platform.”

Last week, Spotify took a step towards becoming a bookseller with its acquisition of Findaway, an audiobook company. The move resembles its Anchor acquisition in 2019, when it doubled down on podcasting. And don’t forget when Spotify launched its own audio rooms, Greenrooms, after acquiring the company behind the sports-audio app, Locker Room.

These acquisitions will also help Spotify appeal to creators. For example, podcasters globally can now use Anchor’s paid subscription features to charge for content. At the same time that Greenrooms debuted, Spotify announced a creator fund to pay eligible content creators based on their audience size and “consumption of content.”

As for new features within the core music apps — there’s a host of those too. Top hunter Chris Messina recently spotted that Spotify is experimenting with a TikTok-esque stories feature for music videos. Messina also hunted Blend in June, a feature for creating shared playlists. The company also partnered with Peloton, Netflix, and Giphy this year to support more music discovery, plus Shopify to help artists sell merch.

And speaking of things no one asked for, Spotify took a moment to try hardware this year too.

Of course, the company's biggest social feature is due to return to you any moment now — Spotify Wrapped. We have fun with those every holiday season, but for those of you who want to want dive into social experiences year-round, you can try humit. But first…

It’s time to talk about NFTs again — unless you’ve been tracking and minting all along.

“I’m Geoff, I “stole” all of your NFTs,“ says Geoffrey Huntley, a software engineer, on his Twitter profile. Earlier this week his project, The NFT Bay, arrived on Product Hunt. It's a torrent site (modeled in the style of the famous file-sharing site The Pirate Bay) that lets you download 15 terabytes of people’s… JPEGs? NFTs?

That is the question.

Huntley’s project shines a light on an issue that some makers have with the current state of NFTs: the majority of images are not stored on the blockchain. Perhaps surprising to those who just wrapped their heads around NFTs, many NFT images are hosted on the same storage sites you use for work files. What likely is stored on the blockchain when you buy an NFT is a reference in the transaction metadata that connects you to the piece, but that doesn’t mean a lot if the platform storing your image goes MIA — does it?

“There is a gap of understanding between buyer and seller right now that is being used to exploit people. The image is typically not stored on the blockchain and the majority of images I've seen are hosted on web2.0 storage which is likely to end up as 404 meaning the NFT has even less value,” wrote Huntley on Github.

You might call Huntley’s project “right-clicker mentality.” The term sums up the idea that NFTs are just images — by right-clicking and saving an image from your desktop menu, you can grab the same image another person paid precious ETH for. NFT enthusiasts get trolled all the time by right-clickers who say their JPEG is no different than the buyers’ JPEG.

Huntley’s project does resonate. Ryan Marr wrote on the launch page: “I bought this NFT, years ago, and for the majority of that time the website was down, and I had nothing to show for anything other than a record on the blockchain.” Like Marr’s NFT, some of the biggest headlining projects you’ve heard of (see: Apes) are not “on-chain.”

But then, some are. LarvaLabs launched Autoglyphs, “the first on-chain generative art on the Ethereum blockchain,” and then took CryptoPunks on-chain in August this year, years after first creating them. New projects like the buzzy Chain Runners are fully on-chain.

Where does that leave us? At the beginning still. The technology is evolving. Experts in this space say to buy art because you love it (and HODL!) Also, be on the lookout for makers in this space working to simplify the process of moving NFT artwork on-chain.

And join in the discussion! What still perplexes you about NFTs?

It feels like everyone is trying to solve real-time collaboration.

We first met Plutoview a year ago with its shared browsing solution. It took Product of the Week and #4 Product of the Month.

“Whoah! It's like a browser in GDocs way!!” wrote one commenter.

Plutoview isn’t the only shared browser we’ve seen (see RemoteHQ or Hyperbeam), but what differentiated it is tackling multiple screens at once. With traditional screen sharing users would share one screen at a time, but that’s not really the equivalent of what would happen in a room. You’d all have your own desktop spaces, each with your own apps and tabs open. In that way, Plutoview gets closer to recreating what an IRL team workspace would look like.

Co-founder Arkadiy Baltser was inspired to create Plutoview after his own experience in the classroom. The startup has been working to infiltrate the education space, where students learning remotely typically need to collaborate across tools from note-taking apps to education platforms.

Now the team has launched an API to enable makers of remote tools, virtual events platforms, and online education academies to leverage its co-browsing and real-time collaboration experience.

“Plutoview API turns metaverses into collaborative environments where all the work collaboration is hosted in-house. Your users get to enjoy their favorite web applications, browsing and working collaboratively, from within your own platform,” Baltser wrote.

He also shared that Plutoview is powered by edge level cloud-computing. We wrote about an alternative approach to edge-computing when we introduced Subspace. For those learning the term, we like this simple definition from Paul Miller via the Verge: “Edge computing is computing that’s done at or near the source of the data, instead of relying on the cloud at one of a dozen data centers to do all the work. It doesn’t mean the cloud will disappear. It means the cloud is coming to you.”

So while Plutoview isn't using Subspace's approach to low latency (yet), what the products have in common is that they’re both, at some level, working on infrastructure to power the metaverse.

Which is also what it feels like everyone is working on these days!

Cookie cutters get a bad rap, but if you start from scratch next time you’re making gingerbread men, you might end up with one of those Pinterest fails.

While there’s no doubt that the world needs space and tools for personal creativity, cookie cutters are templates that save us a lot of time with work.

And the Product Hunt community loves a beautifully-executed time-saver. designstripe shot to the top of the homepage on Sunday with its library of customizable illustrations. The tool’s online editor lets you swap out almost every object from the handmade illustrations, generate new color platelets (or add your own), and adjust the visual look of the graphic, even adding background elements to the image.

Imagine not just being able to customize your gingerbread man’s buttons, but adjusting its shape and house and giving him all the right colors with a tap.

“A big goal for us is to make sure that everything you make with designstripe comes out looking amazing,” wrote maker James Daly. For the future, the team is looking at templates, animations, and 3D (Canva, are you watching?)

In the meantime, you can start customizing illustrations or test out these 7 other template tools so you can focus on whatever it is you're best at:

Pitch Deck - 60 Figma templates based on real experience from fundraising
CommunityOS - Free workbook with resources like email templates to help build your community
Privacy Policy - GitHub repo with tested pop-up modal and layered doc with clickable elements
Product Management - 9 templates created by product leaders from Netflix, Amazon and Spotify
WhatsApp Marketing - 100+ chat templates for WhatsApp marketing
SaaS Emails - Emails from top SaaS companies like Zapier, downloadable as HTML
GPT-3 Template - A Serverless NextJS template to help you build GPT-3 apps
Inovatik - 24 free HTML websites templates available for free under MIT license
Phigma - Figma templates for your Product Hunt launch

It may sound like the crypto space is having all the tongue-twisting fun lately with DAOs, web3, NFTs — but IT teams have recently worked new jargon into their repertoire as well. It’s worthwhile for non-technicals to get acquainted with, because there’s a growing list of thriving startups in this space.

Observability, in the software world, is when you measure and track a system’s state from the data it generates. There are three key pillars: logs, metrics, and traces. If you’re not an expert, you’d be forgiven for explaining the concept as “monitoring.” However…

“Put simply, monitoring measures something and then evaluates the result of that measurement against a defined standard to tell you whether something is good or bad...” explains the Grafana website. “Observability refers to gathering as much information as possible... to ask questions across that information… These are questions that are not anticipated in advance, like monitoring presumes, but rather questions that arise due to unexpected or novel events within a system.”

Grafana was one of three most-promising observability startups to earn unicorn status this year (along with Chronosphere and Cribl) and announced partnerships with Microsoft and Amazon to bring observability services to Azure and AWS. Epsagon has enjoyed a great year too. The Israel-based company offers serverless observability, enabling companies to search and troubleshoot events across microservices.

Epsagon makers first launched the product back in 2018, and updated the tech community last week with Epsagon 2.0. With the new launch, Epsagon has updated its pricing model, giving everyone access its tool for free, with up to 10M traces per month and unlimited alerts and metrics.

This comes a few months after the team announced its acquisition by Cisco. Cisco’s Liz Centoni sums up the value of the technology well in a blog:

“Cisco’s approach to full-stack observability gives our customers the ability to move beyond just monitoring to a paradigm that delivers shared context across teams and enables our customers to deliver exceptional digital experiences, optimize for cost, security and performance and maximize digital business revenue.”

Whether you explain NFTs to your friends or are Googling how Bitcoin works, we’ve got an event coming up to dive into Web3 and all its possibilities.

The Web3 Panel is December 1 at 11:30 am EST, and it’s virtual so you can network before you learn (1,300+ people in so far), or head straight for the virtual chair and hear from the experts including our host, Laura Shin, crypto journalist and host of The Unchained Pod. You can register for free here.

Speaking of virtual events...

The Internet you’re using — it worked really well back in the 90s when delivering static pages and a few graphics was all it was tasked with.

But the Metaverse is coming (or is already here, depending on which metaverse you’re talking about). Real-time apps are definitely here, from RPG games to the software you work with. To match the experience that makers develop for these products, Internet users need stable connections and the lowest possible latency.

Yesterday, Subspace took the top product of the day slot with its Network as a Service solution that uses AI and its own hardware to find the fastest route for delivering data.

“Think about it as the carpool lane for internet traffic...” explained hunter Ashton Kutcher.

Maker Nikki Shum explained how Subspace “weather maps” the internet in real-time giving the Subspace “the power to find the best paths — a combination of existing paths and our fiber-optic backbone—and pull traffic through them in real-time.” If you speak in PoPs and packets, you can check out Subspace’s launch video to get a more detailed diagram of how the weather mapping works.

Subspace CEO also pointed out to VentureBeat that lag is just part of the story — Subspace lets makers “bring private networking to every internet-connected device without changes to code, VPN clients, or on-premise hardware.”

Yesterday's launch made Subspace available to developers worldwide. The startup, founded in 2019, already has 400 million users on its network and has been working with gaming partners.

The bottom line for the rest of us: Subspace has built another way to make demanding online experiences faster for makers, and therefore faster for you. Because nothing takes you out of the Metaverse like your sword getting stuck in limbo.

Would you chip in to buy a copy of the Constitution? A group of people on the Internet have a plan to do just that by way of something called ConstitutionDAO.

What's happening? The idea is for members of the DAO to pool their funds and bid on a draft of the Constitution. This particular copy was originally made for the Constitutional Congress back in 1787 and it’s going up for auction at Sotheby’s on Thursday. It’s the only surviving copy (out of 13) that’s privately owned.

As of this morning, over $40M has been raised to bid on the Constitution, according to DAO member and maker Julian Weisser, who also noted that donations have a "median contribution [of] $228.58."

How does it work? If you’re new to the term, a DAO (decentralized autonomous organization) is a structure that uses blockchain tech to allow participants to self-govern. DAOs enable communities to decentralize authority and automate decisions through rules that are encoded in smart contracts that are stored on the blockchain. In the case of ConstitutionDAO, members join by contributing to the pool (you’ll need Ether) and then will be able to help decide what to do with the Constitution, if it is acquired.

“Governance includes the ability to advise on (for illustrative purposes) where the Constitution should be displayed, how it should be exhibited, and the mission and values of ConstitutionDAO,” explains the ConstitutionDAO website.

If the DAO loses the auction, the makers will refund all of the money. The website makes two things clear: this is not an investment and you won’t be gaining fractional ownership of the Constitution.

What else can DAOs do? Each DAO is different. For example, VitaDAO, which launched in June, was created for community members to fund longevity research. Members join by purchasing VITA tokens, which enable members to engage in decision-making around research funding and governance of the IP portfolio.

The crypto community is bullish on DAOs, while others have been critical of them, especially following an incident where one DAO, called “The DAO,” lost $50M in Ether after coding errors resulted in hackers stealing the money. Since then, makers in this space have poured a lot more thought into the governance of DAOs.

But why this? While ConstitutionDAO notes it’s using this technology to “honor and protect the greatest historical tool for human governance,” it seems fair to say that ConstitutionDAO, if successful, will also serve as a high-profile example of what DAOs — and communities with the right tools — can accomplish.

1.75 million. That’s how many sellers use Shopify to power their businesses. The powerhouse company emerged as one of the biggest winners of post-pandemic booms and hasn't looked back.

Investors and users love Shopify for its comprehensive approach to commerce. Over the last year, the company has been busy announcing new partnerships. In the spring, it strengthened its partnership with Google, enabling merchants to leverage Shop Pay (its fast checkout feature) across Google experiences. In October, Shopify announced that artists will be able to connect their Spotify profiles to their stores for selling merch. MailChimp and Shopify just launched a direct integration, and Microsoft got in on a partnership too.

Then there’s the Shopify App store, which contains over 7,000 apps. They're a critical structure for the company — 87% of merchants use them. App makers add crucial functions for sellers, and challenge the limits of what merchants can do within the ecosystem.

Vajro is a recent example. The Shopify app lets brands build iOS and Android apps that sync with their Shopify stores, with a drag and drop builder (i.e. no-code.) Not only does this give brands a better shopper experience, it enables them to take advantage mobile push notifications, live streaming, and more features that can help boost sales.

“Mobile apps have always been the big guy’s jam… We wanted to democratize mobile apps by enabling and empowering small businesses,” maker Venkatasubramanian Ravi wrote. The app appears to be a favorite among competitors, with 862 reviews at a 5.0 rating when searching for "mobile app" or "app builder" in the Shopfiy App Store.

Need more? Here’s are five top-upvoted apps from the last year for Shopify sellers.

Dialogue: An AI-powered platform to surface suggestions, upsells & cross-sells, content, etc.
Paloma: Create automated shopping conversations for Facebook and Instagram DMs
Reeview: Automate collecting product review videos
Social Snowball: Turn your customers into affiliates with automated codes and payouts
Dovetail: A tool to help recruit, manage, and grow sales through influencers/ambassadors

The US hit a new record. Last week, the Labor Department said more than 4.4 million workers quit their jobs voluntarily in September — the highest on record. It’s driving companies to get serious about their plans for retaining workers.

Remote work has been a centerpiece topic. Emboldened by new tools, conscious founders, and startup success stories (see: Gitlab’s IPO), more startups are embracing remote life. But it’s not the whole story.

“Now is the time for HR to act and implement change,” wrote Kate Lynch for the Forbes Human Resources Council. “There are more innovative and out-of-the-box solutions today than ever before.”

SimplePerks, launching today, is an example. The startup enables companies to distribute benefits cards to employees and create one-time or recurring perks. Employees can use the app to see their perks.

Another example is Carrot Fertility, which closed a $75M funding round in August (and it's one of this writer's favorite benefits from Product Hunt). Fertility benefits have been increasing in popularity for years, but post-pandemic life is giving the space a bump. For one thing, people are revisiting the idea of growing their families again. Another: “68% of adults would change jobs for a company with better fertility benefits” noted Tammy Sun, Carrot Fertility’s founder, to Forbes.

But even the best benefits don’t guarantee your employees will stick around. Sometimes it comes down to fit. There’s a solution for that too. A team of makers launched Unboxable today, a new prediction matching platform that the makers say you can use to hire with 93% accuracy.

“The truth about today's hiring industry is that 46% of new hires are bad hires,” writes co-founder Stephie Knopel. The tool puts talent through an automated Job Simulator, a “fun experience where you also learn about the REALITY of the role, [then Unboxed] surfaces the shape of the talent: a data language that allows us to see with accuracy, if this is a TrueFit and if there's a high chances to thrive on both sides.”

Unboxable isn’t the only self-described job simulator launching today. Forage launched its platform for career discovery and upskilling. Users can job try out job simulations which are “like online courses, with 5-6 hours of content each and show the nitty-gritty of work,” wrote co-founder, Pasha.

“Think of Forage as Skillshare,” he continues, “but for learning real skills used at real companies, taught by the companies you want to work for.”

A couple of teens reminded us this week that age can be just a number when you’re a maker.

First SpaceHey, a MySpace-like site from 19-year-old developer An, hit 200,000 users. Then yesterday, on her fifteenth birthday, Pranjali Awasthi launched Delv, an AI-powered engine that summarizes and graphs information to help you learn about complex concepts faster.

“Let's say you're getting into AI..." Awasthi explained, "[Y]ou want well-researched information on a multi-layered concept like Classification Models, you plug in specific topics you want to know, [and] websites you like reading from. Delv will build you a knowledge graph of connected concepts, with each node representing a highly relevant article's summary.”

Delv has been backed by Backend Capital — Awasthi is an Entrepreneur In Residence at the early-stage VC firm that's founded by Lucy Guo and Dave Fontenot. In her LinkedIn description, Awasthi describes herself as an “AI/ML & Computational Neuroscience Enthusiast.” Articles online have called her a “child prodigy” and “superstar on the rise.”

Awasthi was previously a research intern at the Schwartz Center for Computational Neuroscience. She also interned at the Neural Dynamics of Control Lab at Florida International University where she worked in the overlap of neuroimaging and machine learning on a project that involved building a classifier to detect errors in cognitive tasks using EEG imaging, supported by a grant she received from the New York Institute of Technology.

Awasthi knows her age surprises and inspires and she credits her success to being exposed to academia at a young age via her mother and father, who brought her to the US from India four years ago. The young founder has been active in efforts to introduce more young students to AI.

“I feel we need to start even more early and introduce AI as a core subject even in elementary school starting from basic projects to increase their knowledge base.”