Vote selling on Product Hunt
Every day, after launching, makers are contacted on LinkedIn and X by people offering to sell votes. As the Product Hunt team, we are very much aware of this and really hate it. We have systems in place to neutralize this type of gaming. Every vote counts for a different number of points on Product Hunt. A couple examples:
An account with a recently created gmail address and no history of quality contributions on Product Hunt: this vote will count for 0 points. Yes, this might be a well intentioned user, but we take a conservative approach to protect the community. If the account has a company email or applies for verification on Product Hunt, that's a different story.
An account with a company email address linked to a legitimate LinkedIn account with a history of meaningful contributions on Product Hunt: this vote carries significant weight.
A couple questions for the community:
Are there specific accounts on Product Hunt that you suspect participate in vote selling? You can reply here or email report@producthunt.co
What would you want to see us do differently here?
Replies
vote selling exists because "product of the day" became resume material. you created a status game worth gaming and now youre surprised theres a market for it. fixing supply side is whack-a-mole, the demand is structural. as long as a PH badge on your landing page converts, people will pay for votes
StreamAlive - Interactive PPT slides
We stopped adding our new launches to Product Hunt because of all the vote solicitation messages we got, but with our latest launch we were pleasantly surprised by how few solicitations we got. It restored our faith in the PH voting system because if people aren't soliciting it means that their fake votes are not having much impact on the algorithm
Another thing I know happens is that people have set up agents to upvote most or all products every day on their behalf so that they can get to the top of the streak leaderboard, but I don't think anything needs to be done about that.
Product Hunt
@peterclaridge Glad to have you launching again!
Really appreciate this transparency from the PH team. Vote integrity is what makes the leaderboard meaningful - if you can buy your way to the top, the signal breaks down for everyone.
As someone launching Hello Aria on April 10th (an AI productivity assistant that manages your day through WhatsApp and iOS), this hits close to home. We have been doing things the honest way: genuine community engagement, early users who actually love the product. Watching vote-selling undermine that is frustrating.
The account quality signals you described (email-linked LinkedIn, contribution history) make a lot of sense. A verified organic backer badge for accounts that clear a trust threshold would reinforce the right behavior.
Velocity: AI User testing
I'd love to see some case studies and retrospectives on a YouTube channel of those who's launches faired well. I'd really appreciate some clarity on a break down of how they managed to score so comparatively well on any given launch day.
Launching takes so much heart and soul, fear uncertainty and doubt creeps in. Posts documenting how to meet expectations are great, guidelines like these should be included in the pre-launch dashboard and as much as possible embedded into rewards along the journey of Product Hunt (as they are). First joiners are familiar with SEO and marketers and wanting to drum up support so likely aren't ill intentioned, they just don't realise that it's working against their true aims to be credibility represented.
Maybe there’s room for community flagging of suspicious voting patterns or accounts, similar to how other platforms crowdsource moderation?
Product Hunt
@teofilo_rassin any particular crowdsource moderation implementations you like?
Not big on snitching on people who are trying to game a system but there is certainly a whole community of folks offering to help hit X ranking or provide (not just in-kind) support for X$ per (whatever metric).
I have a launch coming up after supporting / participating in the community for a number of years and I don't think theres a whole lot you can do beyond finding the bad actors. But presume those bad actors just end up supporting a launch they weren't compensated for - you can't really penalize the company who they're supporting.
I think the worst outcome is great product getting lost in a sea of PPV or PPUV and I'd agree that a certain amount of user verification / more stringent policy as it relates to pay for X on the app.
I also don't think its a terrible idea to deploy secret shopper launches / have some of your community members try to get those inbound solicitations / proof - could help curb that practice with obviously banning the account but also.. a degree of fear - if they reach out - their accounts will be banned.
Great to hear the team is digging into this also ***^
@mikekerzhner This is basically a sybil resistance problem. Weighted voting based on account reputation, email domain, contribution history — it's the same identity-trust graph we deal with in crypto. The hard part isn't catching obvious bot farms, it's the gray zone: real accounts with no history that could be legitimate new users or purchased shells. Curious what signal-to-noise ratio you're seeing on the company email parameter — feels like the strongest filter you have right now.
Hatable
Finally! Thanks for this, Mike. I would be reporting a few bad actors. This has become almost like a phishing scam.
People committing that they will get you the first spot, taking money and disappearing.
This is going for years :) Why change it. The fake votes can bring your project up, but it will not convert users, right? Am I missing something?
Vote selling should be strictly prohibited, but along with that there should be some randomness too like we had few days back, the problem faced by new makers not even getting chance or even some sort of display time is really bad, you should try to give everyone a fighting chance, otherwise this kind of voteselling will keep happening!