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Today’s Digest was crafted by Product Hunt and sponsored by our friends at AppSumo.

Some people are truly Black Friday people. They wake up at 4 a.m., brave the shopping crowds, and score ridiculous 98 inch TVs. But regardless of whether you’re “into” Black Friday or not, it would be a shame to overlook some of the exclusive deals over at AppSumo.

Here’s a quick intro for the uninitiated: AppSumo is a software deal site for entrepreneurs, small business owners, and freelancers. The company is committed to the idea that the tools you need to run your business should never put you out of business. 

The cool part: AppSumo offers lifetime deals on these tools (no subscription necessary). Pay once, get access forever.

Pro tip: If these deals aren't enough, members of the Product Hunt community can get an extra 10% off your entire order on top of any of AppSumo discounts. These deals will only be around for 24 hours, so hop to it. 

This year’s AppSumo Black Friday lifetime deals:

📸 Depositphotos gets you access to millions of stock photos

🙌 Quuu automates your social media content curation

🔎 FindThatLead uncovers lead contact info and schedules email campaigns

📊 Sociamonials  tracks your social media metrics and automates posting

🔑 Book Like A Boss lets you sell your services and book appointment

🤖 Continually provides chatbots and live chat to capture leads

📷 LiveWebinar lets you host fully-tailored webinars from anywhere 

📢 HeySummit is everything you need to launch an online conference

🛠 HelpShelf reduces your support tickets with a customer support widget

🗂 Clinked is a white-label client portal for managing projects

🔒 WebARX secures WordPress sites for you

These deals go fast, so don’t wait around too long. Happy shopping.

Happy holiday!

We thought today would be a good day to surface this question from our Makers Discussions: Who is a person (or team) that opened doors for you in your career this year? Share your responses (and tag your person!) with us here or on Twitter.

On behalf of the Product Hunt team, we're thankful for...

🐱 Cats on the Internet
🐶 Dog on the Internet
😂 “GIF”s and “JIF”s
🌍 Makers all over the world
👀 Real-life stories from those makers 
🗞 Learning about tech every morning 
🐥 Twitter
😲 AI-generated models
🍑 Buttsss
👂 Apple’s greatest invention this year
🔼 The most upvoted products this month (so far)

And of course, YOU. 🙏

Important question: What was the best meme of the decade? 🤔

As the 2010s draw to a close, Maker Armand Saramout was inspired to reflect on an amazing decade for meme culture.

“I want to find the best meme that's blessed our feeds and warmed our hearts. It's like a playoff style voting approach, decided by you, the people. I would've called it meme madness but I didn't want the NCAA to sue me.” 

Armand sorted through over 500 memes, and then narrowed the list down to ~120. You can vote for your favorite here, and there’s even a “wild card” round if your favorite meme is missing.

“This needed to exist, thank you.“ - Jordan

For other meme content, check out these canvas prints of memes, the best memes from Reddit, the ‘Google Trends of memes,’  a coloring book of memes and this marketplace to buy, sell and collect “rare, dank memes.”

Over the last few weeks, we’ve seen hundreds of Makers from all over the world take part in the Product Hunt Makers Festival to create awesome products with Snap Kit.

Our showcase had a myriad of creative products, ranging from social apps for sports to trippy video experiences.

So without further ado, here are the winners and runners up across the festival’s categories.

Thank you to all of our community members who voted, and to our good friends over at Snap. 

Category: Creative Tools 🎨

Winner: Swipe Site lets you preview stickers for Snapchat attachments. Made by Thanasi Stratigakis.

Runner Up: GEMI is a video app that lets you shoot videos with your front and back camera at the same time. Made by Jerry Luk.

Category: Snap Kit Combo 👻

Winner: Adventure lets Snap friends share quick, organized travel recommendations. Made by Daniel Noskin.

Runner Up: Meme Match lets you make new Snapchat friends with memes. Made by Jacob Catalano.

Category: User Experience 👀

Winner: Brb is a chat app that lets you send messages, listen to crazy stories and meet new friends. Made by Justin Mitchell.

Runner Up: Stadium Live is a social app to enjoy sports with your friends. Made by Kevin D.H Kim.

Category: Bitmoji 👋

Winner: Surfboard is a crypto portfolio tracker that’s all about you. Made by Vicc Alexander.

Category: Anything Else 🙌

Winner: Wavechat lets you create fun and easy mini podcasts to share to your Snapchat story. Made by Dennis Stücken.

Maker in Chief 🎉

This Festival’s Maker in Chief prize goes to Daniel Noskin for Adventure!

You can see all of the finalists here. Congratulations to all the Makers in the Festival, and thank you to everyone who participated. We hope to see you all at our next one — stay tuned!

A few weeks ago, Instagram announced that it was going to start removing likes on certain accounts in attempts to “depressurize” the app. Some people (like Nicki Minaj) say they’ll stop posting to Instagram if likes go away, and the Product Hunt community had mixed feelings. 🤔

“Honestly, I will post even more now. I tested this feature during my vacation in Brazil and not having this ‘like’ count as an instrument for validation was actually very refreshing.” - Samuel

“Instagram without likes is basically a shared Dropbox” - Allan

“I think it's a good move keeping anxiety and other mental aspects that was associated with like counts.” - Akash

While the removal of likes may make the Instagram experience healthier for the average users, the influencer marketing industry, meme accounts and small businesses — all of which rely on the “likes” engagement metric — could take a hit. 👀

But what would the internet look like without “likes“ at all? We’re talking Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, etc.

Over the weekend, a browser extension called ‘Hide Likes Everywhere’ launched on Product Hunt to hide likes and “other vanity metrics” in order to help users focus more on authenticity (versus approval) online.

“By hiding others' likes and followers, you can avoid comparing yourself to others and become a more independent thinker by using your own judgment rather than defaulting to what everyone else thinks. In the beginning, the absence of all those metrics may feel strange and inconvenient. You'll notice just how much we've come to rely on them. But stick with it, and you'll discover that you're better off without them.“ -Maker DK the Human 

Would you use this?

And for those who want to take an even bigger step towards fighting social media anxiety, we recommend trying out Feedless or Forest.

What happened this week on Product Hunt!? Here’s a look at the week’s big/small/weird/creative/futuristic product launches. 👇

Electric Vehicles 🚘 

Tesla just revealed their futuristic “cybertruck,” a new ($39,000) electric pickup truck designed to look like a sports car. While debuting the truck onstage, Elon Musk asked Tesla’s lead designer, Franz von Holzhausen, to showcase the truck’s “Armor Glass” by throwing a metal ball at the driver window. It...cracked. Musk asked Holzhausen to throw the ball at the passenger window. That cracked too. Elon then proceeded with his presentation in front of a truck with two broken windows. ‘Twas a Silicon Valley gift.

The Weird and Wacky 😜

The crypto sock market is a thing. Unisocks ($SOCKS) are tokens that get you one (real) pair of limited edition socks. Each purchase and sale will move the price.

“Ethereum, but make it fashion!” - Deana

MSCHF, the creative team behind Bull & Moon and  Netflix Hangouts, had an unexpected drop this week — you can text a selfie to their hotline and they’ll have it professionally edited live on camera. They’re calling it “Facetune.tv.“

Self-Care 🙌

Tiny Spells is a daily email that comes with three actionable tasks that help you look after you.

“What a clever idea! I've been a long-time gratitude journal user (and founder) and I think there's something interesting about starting your day off with ideas to make it better. Journaling has helped me do more of this but I like the idea of having specific intentions each day.” - Matt

Moodboost is like Cards Against Humanity but for Snapchat. How it works: Post questions on your Snap Story and have friends reply to make you laugh. BTW, the app detects if you smile.

Big Launches 👀

Warby Parker launched Scout, the company’s first-ever daily contact lens.

“Hoping Scout delivers the polished experience Warby is known for.” - Mary

Synthetic Media company Rosebud AI launched a database of over 25,000 AI-generated stock photos. Rest assured, there are no real people in the database.

“We focused on bringing forth a way to diversify stock photo content since it was a need we heard voiced by stock photo users.” - Rosebud AI founder Lisha Li

Predictions 🔮

Dating apps will invest more in video.

This week, dating app The League launched "live” video dates, a feature where they pair users for two-minute live video chats. The idea is to cut back on bad first meetings in the age of internet dating.

Facebook Dating also touches on this, allowing folks to view each other’s Stories before meeting.

Some other stuff from this week...

A podcast on the future of podcasting (meta). An article from a former Olympian turned tech founder. And a discussion about experimenting on your own body.

Please share your honest feedback about this newsletter here. 🙏

PayPal made its largest acquisition yesterday.

The online payments company bought promo code-finder Honey for $4 billion, betting that the Chrome extension and mobile product will give PayPal a leg up in deal discovery. 💸

A brief history: LA-based Honey was founded in 2012 and has flown somewhat under the radar since its launch. But early adopters quickly “got” Honey’s value — it saved them money while shopping and made googling promo codes a thing of the past.

“I was buying a GoDaddy domain, Honey automatically plugged in a bunch of promo codes and tested them all out, and I saved 14 dollars on a $15 domain. I only paid $1.24!” - Izzy

“Product discovery, where the right consumer has access to the right solution at the right time, is essential. Honey has the solution that people want, now it has to make sure it reaches all the interested folk through channel partnerships.” - Manisha

Honey now has about 17 million monthly active users, who are mostly on the younger side. Similar to an affiliate marketing model, the company takes a commission from merchants when shoppers use Honey (or its rewards program Honey Gold) to make a purchase. The product has saved shoppers over $2 billion to date and generated $100 million in revenue last year. 🛍

PayPal’s plan: PayPal (which currently has 300 million users) will add Honey to its own product line, which includes millennial-minded payments app Venmo. While Honey currently works with around 30,000 merchants, PayPal works with about 24 million merchants, and will now be able to offer more targeted coupons to shoppers.

While investors have historically discounted Chrome extensions, maybe this deal will change things. Some other extensions worth checking out:

💯 Grammarly helps you type mistake-free writing

🙌 Lolli lets you earn Bitcoin when you shop online

👀 Response Viewer shows you multiple screens in one view

🗞 Reader Mode removes clutter and ads from any article

Would you take $10,000 to leave the Bay Area? This isn’t a rhetorical question — a new experiment called MainStreet will actually pay you to do just that. 🧐

MainStreet’s actual mission is to create more jobs and opportunities in rural and suburban communities in the U.S.

“Our goal as a product and as a company is to link the talent that lives in these communities, with the jobs that are based in expensive urban areas like SF and NY.” — Maker Doug Ludlow wrote on Product Hunt.

Doug and his two co-founders, Dan Lindquist and Daniel Griffin, are all ex-Googlers who want to replicate Google’s remote-friendly culture on a larger scale. They’re starting by bringing together tech companies that don’t want to (or can’t afford) to pay Silicon Valley salaries with employees who are willing to move out of the Bay Area to work remotely. Besides career matchmaking, MainStreet will also train tech workers in remote best practices (like video conferencing) and put them up in a brick-and-mortar MainStreet office with other remote workers. These shared work spaces will first show up in Sacramento, Portland and Salt Lake City. 👋

MainStreet’s longer term goals is to create one million jobs in rural and suburban places over the next decade.

The $10,000 bit is part of MainStreet’s launch strategy — the idea is to draw attention to their mission, and ultimately make people realize that they don’t have to live in the Bay Area (or New York, or Los Angeles) to succeed professionally. According to Doug, the program already has thousands of applicants, a large portion of which are “highly-skilled professionals like engineers, PMs, attorneys, etc.”

Would you do this? We really want to know.

Product Hunt members had some suggestions and questions for the MainStreet team.

“I’d love to see this expand to giving money to people who are actually from SF who have been displaced by the immense gentrification.” - Max

“I'm currently buying property in Maine because I can't handle the tiny apartments and concrete of NYC anymore. Over time, I have a (very ambitious) plan the make the area into a little bit of a hub because I know I will miss the community I have in NYC. I'm curious how you're working with places to make this happen.” - Lola

Share your own thoughts here. 👈

If you’re happy where you’re at, you could always work remotely like we do at the Product Hunt team (across 9 countries). Check out AngelList’s remote job board if you’re looking. 

P.S. Makers Festival voting is open! Vote for your favorite product here to determine this year’s winners. 

Facebook is launching apps left and right. Last week we wrote about the company’s two new experimental apps, AUX and Bump. Now Facebook has quietly launched Whale, an ad-free meme maker.

Whale lets users overlay texts and effects over their own images or images from the app’s stock photo library. The idea is that users will then share their meme creations on other Facebook apps (like Instagram, Messenger or WhatsApp). Whale is currently only available in Apple’s Canadian App Store. If you’re in Canada, tell us what you think. 👀

All three of these apps came out of the company’s ‘New Product Experimentation’ (NPE) team, a group building consumer-facing apps to test out new ideas. AUX and Bump have reportedly not gained any traction yet, and Facebook says that all of these experimental apps could potentially shut down. FWIW, Facebook has been doing this type of thing for years — Moments, Notify, Lifestage, Slingshot, Moves and Hello have all shut down. 👋

Facebook is testing in public in order to identify new services that people might like, especially among younger crowds. In particular, it seems Facebook is fighting to stay relevant in the age of TikTok (don’t forget about Facebook’s own TikTok competitor Lasso).

Patagonia’s mission statement is to “use business to protect nature.” And they’ve been delivering on this idea for a while.

In 2017, the company launched Worn Wear, a marketplace of second-hand products made from refurbished old clothes. When customers start to notice holes or worn fabric on their jackets or vests, Patagonia will also have it repaired. But with the rise of sustainable clothing brands — and the pressing need to avoid sending old clothes to landfills — Patagonia has a plan to recycle your old clothes that are truly beyond repair.

That plan is called ReCrafted, a clothing line that recycles “unusable” clothes into one-of-a-kind products. Each piece of clothing is made up of between three and six pieces of clothing, and ranges from items like puffer vests, t-shirts, jackets and bags.

The price point is high ($257 for a repurposed vest, for example), but this type of line could become less expensive as more companies focus on extending the lifespans of garments. For the most part, folks on Product Hunt appreciated Patagonia’s initiative, despite the expense.

“There's a lot of labor involved so I don't think it's an unreasonable price.” - Christine

“Patagonia is awesome. Still rocking my first Skinny Lin's thanks to their lifelong free repairs. Now they even stepped up their game. I hope this can be scaled immensely.” - Dario

Some other products in the business of saving your old clothing (and the planet):

💡 Lunation Lab designed a system of iron-on vinyl to revive clothing

👋 Cutso wants to eliminate fashion industry waste through voting

🙌 Rent the Runway lets you rent clothing (instead of buying it)

👕 Kidizen is a marketplace for pre-loved children’s products

👀 Poshmark is a huge marketplace to buy and sell used clothing

👖 DrobeUp lets you buy, sell and donate women’s clothes locally