from Hacker News

Show HN: Open Hunt – an open and community-run alternative to Product Hunt

by mhurwi on 12/18/15, 6:12 PM with 180 comments

• by mindcrime on 12/18/15, 9:02 PM

  I will definitely use this over ProductHunt. I mean, for crying out loud, I signed up for PH just now to leave a comment and the first thing you get is "commenting is restricted to those users invited by others in the community". Yeah, so I have to supplicate myself to some random Internet stranger and beg permission just to comment on your site? Not happening...

• by jacquesc on 12/18/15, 6:29 PM

  For a bit of background:

  - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10739875

  - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10741827

  I've been a Product Hunt user from their initial HN launch and am still a big fan. They've made a very important impact in the tech scene. Open Hunt is an honest attempt at a community run alternative, tailored to giving / getting feedback, and finding very early stage stuff.

  Would love your feedback!

• by msvan on 12/18/15, 8:18 PM

  The idea is nice, but cynical me can't escape the idea that Product Hunt is successful in part because it is a mirror of reality, where capital and connections are the reigning currency. If you create a platform where capital and connections are deprioritized, you will not attract the people who have that in real life, making it less useful as a promotion venue.

• by richardbrevig on 12/18/15, 10:59 PM

  I love this! "Login unsuccessful. Something went wrong: Error: api_calls exceeding plan authorized calls" when I went to log in with Twitter. Good problem for you to have, I look forward to you working this out so I can participate.

  Honestly, I only signed up for Twitter to join Product Hunt. That was a huge disappointment when I found out that having an account didn't mean anything. This will be a pleasant change, it's about time.

• by DanBC on 12/18/15, 7:41 PM

  I'd join this.

  It's asking for scary permissions:

  > Read Tweets from your timeline.

  > See who you follow, and follow new people.

  > Update your profile.

  > Post Tweets for you.

  Please, consider adding more options, or explaining how you use those permissions. (For example, you can do what you like to my facebook wall.)

  EDIT: Lack of public posting is an interesting choice. It doesn't feel like much of a community. I can see that public comments risks undue negativity or aggressive feedback.

• by mmohebbi on 12/18/15, 7:45 PM

  You should take a look at lobsters. They solve a lot of the transparency issues that some have with HN and ProductHunt.

  "Some other link aggregation sites are operated by corporate entities which may have significant financial incentive to censor or artificially promote the links and discussion that relate to those entities, their investments, or their competitors. Some of these sites have had moderators of popular sub-forums banned after it became known that they were being paid by 3rd party companies seeking special treatment of their submitted stories.

  All moderator actions on this site are visible to everyone and the identities of those moderators are made public. While the individual actions of a moderator may cause debate, there should be no question about which moderator it was or whether they had an ulterior motive for those actions.

  All user voting and story ranking on this site uses a universal algorithm and does not artificially penalize or prioritize users or domains. Per-tag hotness modifiers do affect all stories with those tags, but these modifiers are made public and usually used to shorten the life of meta-discussions. If certain domains have to be banned from being submitted due to spam, the list will be made publicly available.

  If users are disruptive enough to warrant banning, they will be banned absolutely, given notice of their banning, and their disabled user profile will indicate which moderator banned them and why. There will be no hidden or childish "shadow banning" or "hellbanning" of users popular on some other sites.

  The source code to this site is made available under a 3-clause BSD license for viewing, auditing, forking, or contributing to. This code is always up to date with what is running in production on this website.

  Public stats are available for site requests, comments submitted, stories submitted, and users created."

  https://lobste.rs/about

  https://lobste.rs/moderations

• by danielrakh on 12/18/15, 7:47 PM

  So who's going to be the first one to submit this to Product Hunt? :D

• by Vaskerville on 12/19/15, 7:23 AM

  It's ridiculous the way they hand out the ability to make comments. These days, the comments are so watered down many of them are mostly useless. "Tell us about your process"..."tell us more about onboarding". Comments are filled with marketers and friend of friends egging things along without substance. It's hurting the site - if they don't see this they are really missing the boat.

  That being said, it's sad to see people rip on others sites/ideas blatantly. OpenHunt should quickly come up with an original design and find something unique in their approach.

• by mythun on 12/19/15, 7:07 AM

  Love the idea. But a positive part abut PH is that I can view the discussion on the product by people (sometimes) more experienced than me, and then decide if it is worth my time to install/test out the product. If feedback on OH is private that angle is removed.

  But definitely back the idea - PH has become too undemocratic, and its obvious that if you don't have the right connections your product will never surface. I know people who've reached out to "influencers" on PH to have their product hunted by them.

• by tedmiston on 12/19/15, 4:42 AM

  You're #1 on Hacker News and Product Hunt today with an app whose repo was created 12 days ago and your server is not down. That's commendable in itself.

• by tarr11 on 12/18/15, 10:36 PM

  Tried to join:

  Login unsuccessful. Something went wrong: Error: api_calls exceeding plan authorized calls

• by Cyberdog on 12/18/15, 7:59 PM

  Could you please make the description text darker for each listing? Light gray text is very hard to read against a white background.

• by MattBearman on 12/18/15, 8:43 PM

  I'm really happy to see this. As the solo-founder of a bootstrapped start up nowhere near Silicone Valley, things like Product Hunt can make me feel like a complete outsider.

  Quick question: PH wants people to sign up with their personal Twitter account, rather than a company one, is that the case here? I never use my personal account, so would prefer to be able to sign up using @bug_muncher

  Also, I love the "You reached the beginning!" message at the bottom, not sure why, but it really made me smile :)

• by BorisMelnik on 12/19/15, 1:55 AM

  I also signed up for Product Hunt 1+ years ago and don't have the ability to comment even though I regularly share things on Twitter, purchase products, curate lists and interact as much as possible.

  +1 for any alternative system.

• by goodJobWalrus on 12/18/15, 8:28 PM

  If you are naming it "Open Hunt", clearly as a jab at PH, you are giving it more attention than you should, given your mission, IMO.

• by sandGorgon on 12/19/15, 5:08 AM

  This is pretty cool - I notice you're building on top of Rails. Do consider using the source code of lobste.rs (which is like HN but open source). It has quite a bit if community development behind it and I daresay can be quickly adapted into the product hunt model.

  https://github.com/jcs/lobsters

  I'm trying to build in elasticsearch support in lobsters for a personal project - it currently uses sphinx. But it could be pretty cool if you can use that as a starting point.

• by sycren on 12/19/15, 2:00 AM

  Did you consider using http://www.telescopeapp.org/ to build this open version?

• by eecks on 12/18/15, 9:33 PM

  Without comments it doesn't feel like a community

• by kevindeasis on 12/18/15, 10:39 PM

  I will be using this because I think Product Hunt can't manage their waiting lists. I mean I've been waiting for a long time to be removed from the waiting list. I've also been doing their "suggestions" to get a full membership. But, I get nothing. Hopefully Open Hunt gets a stronger community.

  BTW: your api calls for registration has exceeded

• by bambax on 12/19/15, 9:05 PM

  Great idea and execution; already discovered a super-useful service, Bulk Resize Photos.

  Not sure if this is a feature or a bug: when one clicks on the "comments" line, it opens a right-side panel for the current item; if one clicks another comments line, the right-side panel is updated with the new item => so far so good.

  BUT, when one clicks on another item while the right-side panel is open, it doesn't update said panel; it opens a new tab to the item's website, but the panel doesn't change, so that when one comes back to OH, the panel doesn't match the last consulted item.

  It's probably not an easy fix, because, what should happen when one opens more than one item?

  However, since the comments pane is super simple, maybe it would make sense to open it under the corresponding item instead of to the side, so that it's visually related to the correct item instead of being in a generic location?

  My 2 cents. Very cool initiative anyways.

• by bonyboy on 12/19/15, 12:24 AM

  Congratulations, I hope this gets the traction it deserves.

  Disrupting the disrupters.

• by pibefision on 12/18/15, 7:29 PM

  I like the idea. why comments are not public?

• by unclebucknasty on 12/19/15, 2:46 AM

  It seems that one problem with a purely community-driven site like Open Hunt is that the overwhelming majority of people are interested in publishing to it vs. consuming from it. Sure, you might browse it to see if anything there is interesting, but most of the enthusiasm will come from those seeking a channel for their product. Hence, the audience itself vs the publisher set is limited in comparison to "that other site".

  OTOH, the latter site is presumably visited by potential investors and others who have a financial interest in consuming what's published.

  Additionally, without "throttling", you have a ton of stuff featured, adding to the skew. Thus, much of what's submitted has only one or two votes. People are primarily posting and moving on.

  Or, am I missing something?

• by pavornyoh on 12/19/15, 12:34 AM

  I really like how you keep updating the site throughout the day based on the feedback you are getting here. Also, the suggestions made by users going directly to the creator of a project is pretty awesome. Good job.

• by intrasight on 12/19/15, 4:25 AM

  Within a couple weeks, this is going to need curated categorization of products. At the highest level, I'd categorize as: a. physical product b. installed software product c. web service product d. hybrid software+service product

  Could be even broader. Or use tagging. You probably wouldn't look in the above categories for performance events, dining out, or phone sex. Must decide how wide a net you wish to cast, and what ontological approaches to use. But this, in my opinion, is where it gets interesting.

• by mckee1 on 12/18/15, 8:02 PM

  Where is the feedback shown? I have submitted "Too" and it says one person has left feedback but I can't see it anywhere (I am logged in with the account that submitted).

• by mrnismo92 on 12/18/15, 8:14 PM

  1) This is pretty cool

  2) I think this and Product Hunt can co-exist

  3) I'm interested in learning about how other members think Open Hunt can go from "open community" to "sustainable community"?

• by return0 on 12/18/15, 9:12 PM

  I find myself using it already - great job!

  Edit: The subtitle font is way too washed out. i struggle to read it. Also some submissions are not "products" - is that appropriate?

• by astrowilliam on 12/18/15, 11:05 PM

  I'm getting this error when trying to sign up with Twitter.

  "Login unsuccessful. Something went wrong: Error: api_calls exceeding plan authorized calls"

• by AndrewKemendo on 12/18/15, 9:10 PM

  I signed up and submitted actually.

  I am curious, why are comments/feedback all hidden? I would certainly like to read those - even if they are made anonymous.

• by toni on 12/18/15, 8:49 PM

  Can you please add a RSS feed?

• by dayaz36 on 12/19/15, 7:11 AM

  Will be interesting to see the quality of products from both sites. Will definitely be using Open Hunt from now on, then go over to PH to see the discussion on the products. I have no idea why they made the comment section private. That's the only downside I see to the site. Everything else I like.

• by webmasterraj on 12/18/15, 10:33 PM

  Make sure you guys get a daily newsletter going out asap. I don't have inside information, but I'd guess it drives a ton of PH's daily returnee traffic. I for one know I won't be checking this every day, but I would read something in my inbox every morning (same with PH)

• by sideproject on 12/18/15, 9:29 PM

  For those who would like to launch their own version of HN or PH, would love for you to check out HelloBox - something we've been working on for awhile.

  https://www.hellobox.co

  [Now that I think about it, I should put this on the OpenHunt!]

• by eps on 12/18/15, 9:53 PM

  Getting stuck on "Completing login..." screen, with the URL of https://www.openhunt.co/login/callback - just sits there and nothing happens. Using stock iPad.

• by voltagex_ on 12/19/15, 12:00 AM

  Uh oh: Login unsuccessful. Something went wrong: Error: api_calls exceeding plan authorized calls

• by safeharbourio on 12/18/15, 11:07 PM

  For upcoming PH excluded startups, this is amazing, good job jaques, live long and prosper!

• by peckrob on 12/19/15, 4:23 AM

  Hey, this is really cool! Any chance you could add a daily summary email (like PH and some other similar sites have), or am I just missing it? That's a really easy way for me to keep up with what's been featured.

• by secondbond on 12/18/15, 8:08 PM

  Problem will be number of posts per day. There is gonna be huge number of products everyday and some gonna buried down not because of there are not good but there are not so visible - timezone problem.

• by andrewstuart on 12/18/15, 7:35 PM

  It should have paid as well as organic otherwise there's no business model and it's just a small rebellion that might be abandoned for lack of income.

• by goodoldboys on 12/19/15, 7:37 AM

  Just tried emailing you at the address listed on your site and got an undeliverable. Definitely interested in helping contribute.

• by ex3ndr on 12/19/15, 5:47 AM

  What platform are you using behind this?

• by onurozkan on 12/18/15, 9:06 PM

  nice alternative to PH, i believe its a good chance to smaller projects to be on spotlight.

  why OpenHunt is good for PH;

  - It will be a PH's moderation app, every nice project can be submitted by PH's trusted members. - PH can get valuable feedback from this thread. - PH can integrate every feature from OH

• by moron4hire on 12/19/15, 2:07 AM

  I don't like that the comments aren't public. I'm finding it way too easy to be short.

• by secondbond on 12/19/15, 1:27 PM

  Interestingly, no news coverage yet for Open Hunt. May be, conflict of interest with Product hunt.

• by eecks on 12/18/15, 9:16 PM

  Disappointed by the twitter only sign up but I am still going to join because I like the idea.

• by withoutfriction on 12/18/15, 10:01 PM

  Please fix the modal on mobile -- ios9 it seems impossible to get rid of the modal :)

• by Uptrenda on 12/19/15, 5:05 AM

  Good ideas in retrospect always seem so obvious at the time. Love the idea OP.

• by etewiah on 12/24/15, 11:28 PM

  Wow, love it!! Hope you guys kick the producthunt mafia out of existence.

• by t3ra on 12/19/15, 12:48 PM

  PH team's reactions must be like :

  Day 0 : Yeah other 'PH is crap' HN/blog/medium post

  Day 2 : Oh so someone 'anonymous' is building a competitor.. They are having a Google form.. How noobish

  Today : haha Oh look they copied our design . how original

  Future : oh we need to pivot

• by mindcrime on 12/18/15, 9:27 PM

  And just to make things even more meta:

  https://www.reddit.com/r/openhunt/

  (If somebody affiliated with OpenHunt wants control of that sub, just message me).

• by pcmaffey on 12/20/15, 12:09 AM

  My suggestion for a name: "Gather"

  or some iteration thereof...

• by kaushikt on 12/19/15, 7:53 AM

  Great job.

  High time you add pagination on the landing page now. :)

• by misiti3780 on 12/18/15, 11:00 PM

  tried to sign up and got this after twitter auth:

  Login unsuccessful. Something went wrong: Error: api_calls exceeding plan authorized calls

• by KuhlMensch on 12/19/15, 9:32 AM

  Nice, but will wait until comments are public

• by free2rhyme214 on 12/18/15, 8:11 PM

  Awesome!

• by iliaznk on 12/19/15, 7:25 AM

  I wish there was RSS feed.

• by tmaly on 12/18/15, 11:40 PM

  how long did it take you to put the site together?

• by boksiora on 12/19/15, 3:22 PM

  It was about time

• by kilimchoi on 12/18/15, 8:55 PM

  how do you plan to filter spammy links?

• by ex3ndr on 12/19/15, 5:52 AM

  Will ProductHunt shutdown OpenHunt with power of law?

• by purans on 12/18/15, 11:27 PM

  +100