If you were building Product Hunt, what is one feature you would love to add?

@tej_sai I was wondering the same thing!

@tej_sai we used to have DMs but ultimately killed it. Ultimately too many people were abusing it with self-promotion. There's certainly a version of DMs that would be useful and welcomed, but it never became a high enough priority to build relative to other projects. Why do you want DMs on Product Hunt? I'm curious to learn your use cases. :)

@tej_sai @rrhoover Spam and abuse was the first thing that came to my mind too. I guess if you really want to reach out to someone, email or Twitter DM are good available options.

@rrhoover Thanks for your reply. I absolutely see how this could increase spam, especially when it comes to something like product hunt. Here's a few reasons why I wanted a dm feature. 1. Product Hunt at the moment has the biggest community of entrepreneurs, indie makers and marketers. Collaborations between them would be great. If I find a product interesting and want to collaborate with the maker, I would have to leave the platform. 2. Forming genuine connections is hard without dms. Simple things like sharing jokes and memes might go a long way here. As you said, maybe a form of dm exists where we can control the spam. A LinkedIn like system where you can only communicate with your connections might work. While we are at it, a quick question, while building producthunt what was the most challenging part? Cheers

@tej_sai appreciate you sharing. :) Re: your question, the answer varies based on the time period you're referring to. In the very early days, the hardest challenge was getting to a critical mass of engagement. Later on when we hit some scale, we encountered different challenges in community building and spam moderation.

@rrhoover My Pleasure, Ryan. Happy to see you in this conversation,

@davidvkimball how do you want to use these alerts? Are you trying to solve an issue of getting a more personalized feed or you want to make sure you never miss a launch in a more niche category? Or is it something else?

@product_at_producthunt there might be two different use cases here - if I had the ability to opt out of critical alerts for products I can't use - anything Mac or iOS specific, but then get an alert when the Android or Windows version comes out, that would be gold. But ALSO having niche categories like "services related to managing social profiles" or "free for life" tools, etc.