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| Openhunt – forgotten already? | ||
| recommended by 1 user | 2016 | 5 points by kulesh | marketing | original thread | | ||
Not long time ago I was moved by the post revealing flaws in ProductHunt mechanisms. In a way, I felt cheated and really enjoyed the idea of a fair, truly open, upvoting-based service that would tell about the new and exciting products. Someone suggested that openhunt.co can become such platform. As an experiment, I stopped using PH and visited OpenHunt.co on a daily basis. I am sure I was not alone. At first, there were lots of posts with some really good products upvoted. However it quickly died out. Here is the full list of products posted a couple of days ago. MONDAY January 18 ▲ 4 - Webfolio - Showcase and share code snippets! ▲ 2 - Double air hockey table - Invention ▲ 2 - TwitSpot - Spam filter for Twitter direct messages ▲ 1 - Simple Image Optimizer - Compress and optimize your image files to speed up your website loading times. ▲ 1 - TODOED - Turn any text into a delegated todo. The question is – where is everybody? Got back to ProductHunt I suppose? Shouldn't we regroup and try harder in supporting free and open, HN-like systems such as OpenHunt? P.S.: I have no relations with OpenHunt. | ||
| One user recommended this thread. What they said: |
| satvikpendem Jul 14, 2025 | on: Show HN: Refine – A Local Alternative to Grammarly | context |
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There is a great comment I read about a decade ago from anthony_franco [0] about exactly this issue with many "open source alternatives to X", this one specifically about an alternative to Product Hunt that then failed:
> OpenHunt tried solving a problem for the content makers without providing any additional benefit to the content consumers. It's a nice, heart-warming mission. But in the end of the day, content is king, that's what consumers want.
> There have been many examples of people rallying around a "free and open" version of a service. They fail to realize that the end consumer barely cares. Look at voat (Reddit), app.net (Twitter), Diaspora (Facebook), even ycreject.com (Y Combinator) tried to be a thing for a while.
> If someone is able to make it "free and open" while also making it a better experience than the alternative, then it'll be a big success. But so far everyone gets that wrong.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10934465#10940729