Last month we shared a preview of a big update to producthunt.com (thanks for all your feedback). Soon, we’ll have a beta to share with a small group of friends (proof!). If you’re interested in playing with something new, joining our private Slack group, and helping us build the future of Product Hunt, apply to our Super Top Secret β.
In the meantime, I'd love to hear your ideas. What would you like to see on Product Hunt? (crazy ideas encouraged 😀)
@rrhoover I'd love a bridge outside of the techo chamber. Not sure what that would look like, but I feel like the things I see on PH are well curated versions of things I'm going to see eventually through my normal channels. There's a whole world out there that PH's curation could introduce me to.
@jasoncrawford@rrhoover Totally agree! I've hunted a few Kickstarter projects and would definitely love to see these in a separate section. Perhaps tags could be used to filter things like this?
@rrhoover personally, better search and the ability to schedule hunts.
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@rrhoover Would be great to surface some comments from hunted products. See what people are actually saying about the products hunted today not just the voting...
(crazy idea)
change commenting completely:
organize into "maker questions"/"product suggestions"/"general discussion"/"bugs and problems".
set up key generation. remember BEME? that discussion was 200 messages of people asking for keys. 😷. it'd be very cool, albeit difficult, to have a company (BEME, for example) give PH 200 keys to be raffled off among the community.
@rometty_ LOVE the idea of creating context and different experiences around comments. @jsneedles once suggested we add polls. We could add formal reviews too. What else!?
@rometty_ This is a brilliant idea and would allow certain people with different interests and skillsets to comment, providing more streamline organised comments.
@benjiwheeler 100% agree. We've thought a lot about it and are inching our way toward something new but it's also one of the more "risky" changes. It's not as simple as opening it up to everyone -- doing so would result in hundreds of posts on the frontpage.
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@rrhoover@benjiwheeler You could then "paginate" your front page, kinda like hacker news. Where selected product go to the front but if a user clicks "more", they could see the other user submitted products. These products could then be ranked by votes or a combination of metrics.
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@rrhoover The care in what gets to the front page is a crucial part of what makes PH a great experience, but sometimes the way that's working seems very opaque, especially when creators post "how i became top 10 all time on PH" posts that seem completely out of step with what PH tells creators to do on the FAQ
Work on the ALGORITHM!
It's NOT OK that a product with let's say 300 votes is below one with 200 votes.
I do understand that you factor in where the votes came from (direct/homepage) and I agree this is a good criterion but it should have a small weight.
What I DON'T agree with is that the number of hours a product is on the website is a factor.
This way everybody launches at lunch or even dinner time and gets to the top with 100 votes.
And that top is then sent to the email list the 2nd day.
All products should start on the page at the same time - so people submit for the next day so each gets the same chance.
If a product is on the website for 24h, everybody will have same chance.
I do understand that timezones come into place, but you can factor that on how you show the order (but with a smaller weight), but not on the final top.
Especially because hitting the next day - top 5 email is so important.
Hope this helps :-)
@ovinegrean "It's NOT OK that a product with let's say 300 votes is below one with 200 votes." I respectfully disagree.
We used to use a stack ranked algorithm where the top upvoted product was always at the top which resulted in only products posted before ~5am getting much attention. If a post gets 50,000 views and 200 upvotes and another post gets 10,000 views and 300 upvotes, clearly the second post is more interesting to the community.
That said, we're working on changes to the algorithm so it's more scaleable and a better representation of what the community finds interesting/useful/worthy of being at the top.
@rrhoover If that post with many views would have been so VALUABLE to the community, it would have gotten more up votes as well. It's easier to game views than votes.
I understand you want to show a 'trend' as well, so you can play with the positioning or some visual representation during the day of, but after that (and the email), votes should be thing that matter most.
And about posts before 5AM .. that's why all the products should start at the same time.
@ovinegrean No. You're wrong. Time as a factor is so crucial, it's not about a product having longevity but about it being so cool and so new that a lot of people in the community want to upvote it real quick. If that # of votes is fewer than a stale product with 1.5x the votes... the newer item deserves to be crowned a victor. It was able to gain a substantial amount of support in a shorter amount of time. Upvotes <> Value. Upvotes contributes to value, but should never be considered the only factor therein.
Also, @rrhoover has a lot more information than you on his community, both qualitative and quantitative to provide us with what we'll value most. Not just what be the most popular after a day of being on the site.
I'd love to see the "Upcoming" section get a little more shine. There was a conversation on Maker Hunt the other day between some very heavy users of PH that they'd just discovered it and weren't sure when it had been "added." It would be great if more people were involved there before things pick up speed.
That plus more emoji! 😁👍 which judging by the screen of the beta is a direction you're going. Just don't be afraid to go all the way and make something game changing like Hipchat 😉
https://youtu.be/0ThN9gV00Mw
@decktonic@benwtnb it's intentionally subtle. We see a lot of duplicates and things posted there that aren't appropriate for PH (e.g. events), but we do want to make that more useful and a better source for surfacing great stuff.
@radiofreejohn honestly, I think Facebook does a pretty good job with event discovery already. We could build an "event hunt" but I'm not sure it's the most impactful thing we could do.
@yoavanaki I love movies. How do you imagine it would work? Some movies are announced months in advance, sometimes with a trailer. Others are available for streaming online.
@yoavanaki Totally agree! People should be making short documentaries about their companies and the process through which they built their products. It's hard to know about the team behind the product (not just the official Makers).
@rrhoover@yoavanaki Ha. Great points. I guess every movie could have an embedded trailer, along with a link. Upcoming/available is already handled very well on other verticals. Maybe PLATFORM, when it comes to movies, could be replaced with just FORM - documentary, thriller, short, etc. Movie discovery is such a pain that PH could totally sweep in and become the most awesomest movie discovery platform ever!
Crazy idea: I think one thing I would like to see is more quality discussion. I think a good way to do that would be to show your IQ based on the votes you receive for your comments. Then there could be levels of cats like naive kitten all the way to smart lion. It would encourage people to want to comment and share ideas. When someone sees or hovers on your profile, you will see their PH IQ level.
I hope I can be a smart lion 😼
@danoliverlandy haha, I like that. We've been chatting about implementing a system that gives people recognition for adding value to the discussion as determined by the community. There's a 95% chance we'll release something like this soon.
Hmmm I would be thinking a trending list... based on platform.. I don't have an iPhone so don't care there is a new App that I can't use anyway.... maybe something of a filter?
I would think categories would be interesting even if powered by tags so it would be possible to easily browse collections of analytics apps... I would also suggest a guide for how many people might have saved this item to a collection...
@davidiwanow good call. We're working on a tagging system to better categorize everything and give people a way to dive deep into specific platforms, genres, etc.
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