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Yesterday, Google launched an “experimental” Chrome extension called Tune to hide toxic comments on sites like YouTube, Twitter, Facebook and Reddit.

Behind the curtain: Tune is part of a conversational AI research project made by Google Jigsaw — a unit of Alphabet that aims to use technology to make the world safer.

It works by letting you set the volume of toxic comments you see across different sites down to “zen mode” to skip over comments completely, or you can turn it up and see allll of them.

The Product Hunt community had some mixed reactions...

“On one hand we criticize filter bubbles, on the other hand, we build things like this” - Anna

“Useful focus group to see how people pick and choose what they deem as something not worth seeing. Data farm to inform grander goal.” - Christopher

“It's simply an unhealthy approach to information” - Filip

For some, one toxic comment can create fear around posting online or using certain websites altogether (i.e. social media). For others, it's easy to ignore the trolls. That's the idea behind Tune; it gives power back to readers.

But is a censored internet what we really want?

There's already Refined Twitter and Blindfold for controlling Twitter. And there's Vanilla for checking the toxicity of your own tweets. There's also Sour Grapes for hiding negativity on your Facebook Ads.

If anything, what we need right now is a more *transparent* internet. It's worth noting that Google claims that no personal data is stored from the extension.

At Product Hunt, we see a ton of product launches from makers with different backgrounds and levels of experience happen every day. But what happens after a successful launch? 🚀

As ideas start to grow into actual businesses, the number of tools and services you need to keep operations running smoothly grows as well. Here at Product Hunt, we currently use 39 (!) products across our team.

When it comes to choosing and implementing these services as a founder, the sheer amount of options can be overwhelming — and prices can add up quickly. So we're launching a solution: Founder Club.

What it is

Founder Club is a curated collection of top products and services designed to help you start and grow your business. To start, we've partnered with 27 companies to offer great deals on these tools to club members. Our launch partners are:

• StickerMule - 100 custom die cut stickers for $29
• AWS Activate - $5,000 in credits
• Sentry - $150 credit
• Baremetrics - 30% off
• Hubspot - 30% off and 15% ongoing
• Hootsuite - 50% off
• Adespresso - 40% off
• Asana - 30% off
• Typeform - 50% off yearly Pro plans
• WeWork - 10 - 20% off
• Mailjet - 1 year free on the Sliver Premium Plan
• Slab - 50% off for 12 months
• Mixmax - 30% off for 12 months
• Segment - $25,000 credits applicable to Segment's Team plan
• Gusto - 3 months free
• Sketch - 30% off
• iubenda - 30% off Privacy Policy Generator + Cookie Solution
• Aircall: 25% off for 1-Year
• The Information: $150 off
• Calm: 30% off
• Pusher: 6 months of Chatkit free
• Instabug: $500 credits
• Browserstack: 30% off live 5-user plan
• Algolia: $1000 credit
• OpenPhone: 40% off for 1 year
• Rover: $25 credit
• Xero - 25% off for 6 months
• Product Hunt: discounts sprinkled in, including 50% off on Ship and Job listings 😸

Pricing

Founder Club is a subscription-based membership, priced annually.

• Discounted launch pricing (expires on March 15): $30/month charged annually
• Regular pricing: $60/month charged annually

How to join

From now until March 15, anyone can join Founder Club to redeem these deals. On March 15, folks who want to join will be placed on a waitlist so we can make sure we're able to provide the best experience for our club members. 😻

Join the Founder Club.

Raise your hand if you woke up late, were late to a meeting or were generally confused by the time yesterday. 👋

You're not crazy — the clocks moved forward an hour on Sunday because of daylight saving time. “Spring ahead,” as they say. ⏰

The good news: your days will start to get longer and longer. The bad news: the time change will take some getting used to, especially if you're on a distributed team. And yes, the global Product Hunt team struggled with the time difference yesterday.



For those of you who also have teammates all over the 🌎, here are some apps to help you keep your times coordinated:

Menu World shows the time for different cities right from your menu bar 🌉

There lets you follow your teammates and their local time ⏱

FlagTimes is a Mac app for anyone working in different time zones 👀

Tropic lets you see where your remote teammates are in their work day ☀️

Spacetime lets you see where calendars overlap on your remote teams 📆

Padbury Clock Screensaver is a minimal screensaver that tells time 🙌

Death Clock is a gentle reminder that life is fleeting 💀

Product Hunt Clock displays the time at Product Hunt 😻

SXSW kicked off on Friday, bringing folks in tech, film, media and music together for the annual festival in Austin, Texas.

Since the event draws an early-adopting crowd on the hunt for the next breakout hit, the fest has historically served as a launch pad for new apps to take off. Previous SXSW breakouts include: Twitter (2008), Foursquare (2009), Highlight (2012), Secret (2014), and Meerkat (2015).

This year, however, SXSW is shifting away from a place for startups to launch apps. Big tech companies focused more on branded *experiences* — from Snap's “Snap House” to Patreon's “House of Creativity.”

And politics came to the festival in a big way this year. Up-and-comers like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Beto O’Rourke were there, and presidential contenders like Amy Klobuchar, Howard Schultz, Elizabeth Warren and John Hickenlooper all spoke at the fest.

Electric scooters also made a splash at SXSW, as they became the primary way to get around.

While the jury's still out on a hot new breakout app from SXSW this year, the winners of the festival's annual pitch competition were announced yesterday. Here are a few of the winning apps you should check out:

Tankee is the first gaming network for kids 🎮

Nebula Genomics wants to put all of you on the blockchain 😳

Supportiv is an anonymous support network 💬

Twenty Tables helps people find meals at local restaurants for $6 🍔

Healium uses VR to lower stress 😌

We're also keeping an eye on Traverse, a new immersive audio platform that will let you map your surroundings with AR. It's set to launch at SXSW today.

Happy International Women’s Day! 🎉

To celebrate, we’re highlighting women Makers and their infinite wisdom. Every day, we see women share their creations on Product Hunt, from tools that help you launch your own MVP to micro-robotic sex toys to podcasts that put women at the forefront.

We’ve gathered some of our favorite nuggets of advice from these empowering women:

Steph Smith, Maker of FeMake, Eunoia, Make Yourself Great Again and nomad (hubb), emphasizes the importance of staying open to new challenges. 🙌

“It’s helpful to recognize that many makers are still learning and often feel like imposters, even if they’ve been creating for years. The only thing that separates those who are successful from those who aren’t, is the few that are willing to continuously build, iterate, and learn from their mistakes.”

Sarah Noeckel, Maker of Femstreet, talks about the importance of a strong brand. 💪

“There is a big difference between brand and branding. It's not about the Femstreet logo but about the way we communicate who we are, what we do and why we do it. Brand helps to accelerate the adoption of your product, attract talent, investor awareness and it has forced me to work on my messaging and Femstreet's positioning.”

Tracy Chou, Maker of Project Include, says that emotional resilience is key. 😌

"I’ve found emotional resilience to be an absolute requisite for all my work. With regard to startups for example: in addition to the baseline level of anxiety that often comes with startup uncertainty, there is also the emotional turbulence, the highs and lows that can be triggered by almost anything, whether it’s team growth or dysfunction, fundraising success or setbacks, product traction or lack thereof, press, competitors, or honestly, really anything."

Julia Enthoven, Maker of Kapwing, recommends staying action-oriented. 👏

“Do. When it comes to products, you’ll almost always learn more by trying the create it than you will by talking to experts, asking for advice, planning, etc. Engineers are analytical people who study the best solutions, but entrepreneurs know that perfection is a waste of time. To maximize your learning and the quality of your work, make with urgency and launch prolifically, even if you feel vulnerable.”

Abadesi Osunsade, Maker of Elpha, emphasizes the power of community. 🤗

“It can be tough to identify blockers when you're building a product or growing in your career, that's why community is so important. Having like-minded people around you who can relate to your experiences gives you the clarity to design solutions and next steps that make perfect sense for you.”

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

Here’s a thought: What if you could consistently make people go “WOW” whenever they visit your site?

And what if you could understand what ultimately makes them leave your site — so you can give them what they want and make them stay?

Enter: Hotjar.

Hotjar is a user behavior and feedback tool that allows site owners to see how people are actually using their site, and collect feedback to understand why they behave the way they do. 🙌

While traditional analytics tools like Google Analytics provide a bird’s eye view of website traffic, Hotjar goes beyond the numbers with visual heatmaps, session replays and on-page surveys that help answer questions other analytics tools can't. Let’s call it the qualitative side of quantitative data.

What the Product Hunt community thinks:

“I love using Hotjar and have used it in conjunction with Google Analytics for years! I am able to gain so much insight from watching the recordings of people interacting with the site. This is something I would recommend to any digital marketing professional” - Rebecca

“This is a much-needed out-of-the-box product that gives us the heatmaps we want — all for a price and ease-of-use that isn't prohibitive! I was intrigued, and literally had this product spun up in a live web application and recording data in under five minutes” - Nick

The value of this type of feedback loop

Traditional analytics tools can tell you what your users are doing (e.g., 60% quit before completing their purchase), but only website feedback tools like Hotjar can help you understand why this is happening (e.g., the slow delivery rate is making them pause). Once you know the customer experience, it’s easy to see where you can improve.

Over 30,000 companies use Hotjar, including InVision, Microsoft and Nintendo, to name a few.

At Product Hunt, we hear a lot about what it means to make a product — whether it's in the comments of a launch post, in a tweetstorm, on our podcast or in our DMs. The details behind these stories often translate into a lesson another Maker could use. So we decided to put these “How I did X” anecdotes in one place.

Today, we're excited to take the hood off Maker Stories, a platform for Makers to share their knowledge on Product Hunt.

What you can expect

Every day, we'll curate new stories from Makers — whether they're long-time CEOs or solo creators — to give real, accessible insight into what it means to make a product, build a team, acquire the first 100 users, and all the other things that go into building something new. 💪

We'll cover things like how to bootstrap a community-driven business with 50,000 members and why press stunts work to grow $20K in MRR. These will come as traditional blog posts, reimagined tweetstorms, Q&A sessions, podcast summaries and other experimental formats.

Share your story

We also want to feature you on Maker Stories. We're looking for stories on startup lessons, side projects, works in progress, failure, productivity, growth hacks and anything that goes into making a product come to life. Give us all the nitty-gritty details. 😍

If you're interested, share your story here with the following:

• Your name and job title
• A sample headline for the piece
• A 1-2 sentence description of the story's angle
• Your Twitter handle (if you have one!)
• The story!

Note: If you want us to republish a story you've already written, please provide a link to the story. Articles, Twitter threads and podcast transcriptions welcome.

Raise your hand if you're terrible at remembering passwords. ✋

Good news. Yesterday, the World Wide Web Consortium approved WebAuthn, a new authentication standard for password-free logins.

How it works: WebAuthn is an API that lets websites communicate with security devices, and allows users to log into their online accounts using biometrics and authentication hardware like FIDO security keys.

WebAuthn is already supported by browsers like Chrome, Firefox, Edge and Safari. Android and Windows 10 also support the new standard.

The next step for WebAuthn? Websites need to integrate the standard. Dropbox, Facebook, GitHub, Salesforce, Stripe and Twitter are already on board.

Why this is important: WebAuthn is more secure than the weak passwords that a lot of people use to safeguard their online accounts. Three out of four people use duplicate passwords online, and 21 percent of people use passwords that are over 10 years old. 😳

What does this mean for password managers like 1Password, PadLock, Dashlane, Google Titan and Blockvault? Time will tell. But not having a password at all is simpler than having to remember any password in the first place. 🔒

“What if there's a chatroom where you pay per message?” - Marc Köhlbrugge

That's the basic concept behind Expensive Chat, a chatroom where you pay $0.01 per letter. Expensive Chat launched on Product Hunt last week from Maker Marc Köhlbrugge, who also runs WIP and BetaList (among many side projects). The more abstract idea behind the product: chatrooms turn into chaos quickly — so how will people act when every letter matters? 🤑

We noticed in the product's comments that people were surprisingly game for the social experiment, and even had some suggestions for other ways to monetize conversations on the internet:

“It will change the internet. It'd be nice if implemented in groups on WhatsApp or Telegram to reduce spam notifications. Google should think about this to fight email spam too. Email from non-contact lists should pay” - Agus

“This concept should be applied to intra-office email/chat communications. Or meetings. Apply cost to disruption like this and it could make communications between co-workers or meetings far more productive” - Hayden

“I want an integration with Twitter to get to know how much my timeline is worth” - Alessandro

Since Expensive Chat's been active, folks have paid to post things like a job board for remote opportunities and requests to follow personal Instagram accounts and podcasts.

It's turned into a conversational ad platform, which may play into Köhlbrugge's vision. In the future, he says he imagines Expensive Chat could be a place where celebrities or professionals could host paid chats. 💬

We've seen a few other “social experiments” looking to combat conversation overload. SayHenlo only lets you send users one message, and you can’t send another message until they respond to your last one. Leeroy is like a decentralized Twitter, where instead of "likes" you get "tips" for good content (and get paid real ETH it). Cardpop is like Snapchat, but for postcards — you can send cards from photos you've taken on your phone.

The internet may have its own podcast soon.

Yesterday, TAYL launched on Product Hunt to give content on the internet a voice. How TAYL works:

Step 1: Signup to create your own “podcast”
Step 2: When you find something interesting online, bookmark it on TAYL
Step 3: Later on, grab your AirPods and start listening to the internet (i.e. the sites bookmarked)

Some of TAYL's additional features:

It detects the language of text automatically 🔍
It uses A.I. to summarize long articles 🤓
It lets you select from over 50 voices in 17 languages 🌍
It sounds (almost) human 🎧

Some early reactions on Product Hunt:

“I’ve always wanted something like this. I listen to a lot of podcasts, never get the time to read though” - Keir

“Best voice imitation” - Anna

Audio technology like this could be a solution for people with vision or reading problems, and we're seeing others dip into the space.

Narro also turns articles into a podcast 📰
Voice Dream Mail reads you your emails 💌
Read2Me turns any website or file into a podcast 🎙
Play turns your Wordpress articles into podcasts 📝
Speechkit creates audio for any news story 🎧