What other gamifications would you like to see in this platform?

1. Bringing back animated logos

2. Increasing gamification with Kitty points, more upvote power, posting rights, and improved post visibility. Technically, it will cost you Kitty points to post, but if your post performs well, you'll earn even more Kitty points.

3. Adding separate categories, especially for big companies that launch frequently. It bothers me to see Claude taking the top 3 spots five times in the last six days. Even as a Claude user who has discovered new features through these launches.

Thoughts on randomization:

• Today, I echo the sentiment that randomization is exciting, but I am not sure it should happen every day.

• By the end of today, I realized many teams actively mobilize their networks for support on launch day, and they deserve a clear incentive to reach the top of the leaderboard.

• If we randomized rankings daily, we might unintentionally discount the effort that goes into distributing a launch and sharing the joy of that day with a community, newsletter, or broader network.

• Example, when you launched Nika, your followers were notified (I got the notification) because you built that following. Imagine someone who just signed up to PH yesterday is on the random leaderboard shuffled majority of the launch day alongside you, totally discounting on the visibility that the support of your followers would have brought to you if you were ranking in top 5 due to their support.
  

• I feel the traffic is getting distributed across products instead of being tiered (top 5, top 10 and the rest). This will be good for days where there are less products on the leaderboard. If there are 30+ then it's actually taking away traffic from products that are genuinely distributing their launch and bringing their traffic to Product Hunt.
  

• That said, when a product is not doing any distribution yet still benefits from community and algorithmic support, randomization can help surface it, which is positive, but it also feels unfair to those who are putting in the work, so the impact is mixed.

• One alternative could be to keep the first four or more hours of the day random as usual and the rest of the day fully merit-based, and then introduce randomization on a designated “random launch” day (say every weekend or thursday) so smaller teams or spontaneous launches can benefit from extra visibility.

Followup on YC day: The YC leaderboard was a fun experiment, but we never learned who actually got YC interviews, so a follow-up post on it would be helpful.

New idea: We could introduce a dedicated hackathon day. The PH team announces a theme or core idea, everyone ships something within 24 hours based on that foundation, and those submissions get their own leaderboard.

Finally, it would be amazing to see the team bring back real life events or allow us to host meetups in our own cities, as well as the blogs and stories, to learn behind-the-scene stories about makers, products and their launches. Maybe guest post submissions could be opened.

The randomized leaderboard is a smart move. The regular one can feel like it only rewards people who already have a big following.

One thing I'd want to see is a "builder streak" - not for commenting, but for shipping updates after launch. There's a lot of incentive around launch day but almost nothing that rewards what happens after. And that's where the real work is.

I’m actually a big fan of all the little gamification bits on PH, it’s one of the reasons I keep coming back!

Streaks, Kitty points, leaderboards... it makes the whole thing feel a bit more alive instead of just another platform you scroll through.

The randomised leaderboard today was a nice touch too, much less predictable and gives all launches a chance of success!

It would definitely be cool to see even more small game-like ideas layered in over time. Nothing too heavy, just stuff that nudges people to explore or interact more. Perhaps something like Duolingo style daily quests?