The forum guidelines say "genuine question or insight." I think most people miss the second part.
I've been reading the Product Hunt Forum Guidelines repeatedly, trying to understand why some threads get through and others don't.
The guidelines say: "If it's not a genuine question or a genuine insight, we won't approve the comment—or we'll put it in self-promotion."
I've been thinking about the "insight" part. A genuine insight isn't a lesson. It's not a framework. It's not "10 things I learned." It's an observation that helps someone see something differently.
The difference between "here's what I learned about pricing" and "I raised my prices and lost zero customers—here's what actually happened" is that the second one is an insight. The first is content.
Have you ever posted something you thought was an insight and had it rejected? What was the difference between that and something that got through?
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Mine was the forum. It was an indexing measurement, 551 Indexing API notifications in 58 days, and I put it in p/vibecoding because I'd posted about indexing in p/general the week before. Rejected in about two minutes. It was also the first thread I'd posted with an image, so I can't say which one did it.
What I can say is that every thread of mine that got approved went in p/general as plain text.
Had one rejected just yesterday. It was a two line question about a tool you dropped, basically no insight in it. The ones that got through all had my own story in them.