I've had a long-standing theory that's a bit derivative of Poe's Law[1]: that it's impossible to come up with a startup parody that someone, somewhere in the Valley isn't legitimately trying to raise money for.
I found @fakeproducthunt on Twitter, and a lot of them seemed suspiciously real. And, a lot of actual Product Hunt products would have been right at home on the parody Twitter account.
So, I made a game where you guess what's a real PH product, and what's taken from @fakeproducthunt.
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[1] Poe's Law: "Without a clear indication of the author's intent, it is difficult or impossible to tell the difference between an expression of sincere extremism and a parody of extremism."
@gkoberger Is there a link to see the product when it's a real one?
Definitely you can't have a link pre-guess, cause it gives it away instantly, but after guessing I wanted to check out some of the products and couldn't find a link. Since there's no way to search the internet yet… or I can be lazy at times, I was SOL ;)
@gkoberger I'm dumb… clicked that and was thinking "Why is it just bringing me back to Product Hunt?"
Feeling tempted to edit my comment now, since I just pulled one of these: https://twitter.com/designuxui/s...
Love this! Thinking about turning "Guess the Twitter Source" (related/similar products section) into a platform where users can pick specific Twitter accounts and create their own games like this. What do you think?
@v4violetta@gkoberger Wow, I literally used your exact words without realizing. Cheers, Greg, that was beautiful and surprisingly fun! Even the face-palm-y products I was SO SURE WERE FAKE
For instance:
@bramk@erictwillis It got realllly hard to decide what should be included and what shouldn't. I tried to avoid the blatantly joke-y ones, but it's not black and white.
For example, the Startup Legitimizer is a joke name but actually provides a real service people can/do use.
The sexist tip calculator, Toothpick, is a joke... however it works for real and has an important social reason for existing.
Or, Ship Your Enemies Glitter is clearly a joke but has made the founder lots of money which makes it more legitimate than most serious Product Hunt products.
In the end, my metric was that each real product should have at least approximately 100 upvotes to be included. There's a few exceptions I made because they were too perfect to not be included, however that was my general rule of thumb.
@bramk Ok. Cool. I got hit with Geocities Site Builder and got it wrong! I said it was a fake product....which it was because it was an April Fool's joke product. haha @gkoberger
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