We Won the fight against Cheaters and Bots

W

wizz

New member
Back in July, I launched my website builder on Product Hunt, it was a really good launch, we got almost 1000 upvotes, but out of nowhere a rival appeared with more upvotes and won. I investigated their marketing, they had no viral posts on the internet, nothing. I could barely find any organic content. Only paid marketing stuff. Most of their upvoters all looked the same, and I could see a pattern, I reached out to Product Hunt, but I heard no response. I spent weeks preparing for this launch. I was very upset. Not because I lost, but because it was an unfair loss, which was clear to me, and even later PH staff replied privately to me that they knew those were fake votes, but ...

Yesterday I launched Index Rusher. We were on top for half of the day and all of a sudden exact same thing started happening. A tool appeared out of nowhere and we dropped to be 2nd.

But this time I had a plan on how to destroy both the cheaters and the bot farm
  1. I scraped all voters of the cheater product.
  2. They all had the same pattern. They voted for the cheater and commented on the other random tool from the day. I fetched all commentators of the day and then fetched their votes and mapped it all in a table. I wish PH let me fetch all voters of a single tool, but it won't. So I had to do a lot of extra work to get this data. Most of the votes turned out to come from this schema. I reported each comment to the Product Hunt team(I reported 400 comments manually).
  3. I also reached out to their support team and they cooperated. So the PH team actually cares, that's great. I didn't expect this. Big respect.
  4. They removed the fake votes from the cheaters(the other top 2 products from the top 3 were cheating.
  5. Since those cheater accounts are also suspended from PH, it might mean the upvote farms have to create new accounts and spend weeks warming those up.
  6. I'm thinking of implementing an automated system to do all that I did so that it runs every day to expose all the cheaters.
  7. I do this because it breaks my heart when I realize how many honest and hardworking indie makers spent 24 hours promoting their launch and hoping for the best with no sleep but a VC-funded startup spent 5 minutes to buy the upvotes and won the day.
P.S. When I did the analyses for the fake accounts, the result was very upsetting. In my estimate, over 50% of top tools have used their service and cheated. Most of those tools are VC-backed, some are the founders I know. Most of the founders are honest people, so it's most likely their marketing people who took a shortcut, and bought upvotes.

There are many real winners too who earned it. PH is still a good place. But we need to help PH to get better and be what it was years ago.

If anyone is launching on PH and suspects an unfair game, reach out to me. I will run my scrapers and scripts again to see and validate if the claim is true.

Again, not all top tools are cheating. From the list I've gotten, there is a pretty standard profile of a cheater startup. I don't wanna share it publicly since it might be offensive. And one more thing: I got 23 offers to buy fake upvotes yesterday. I played dumb and pretended I wanna buy it. I was kinda about to pay. But then at the last moment, I asked casually about their previous clients, just to be sure it was legit. Most gave me the list. I compared this list to the list from my analysis. The match was 100%.

P.S. Thanks to the indie maker community for all your support yesterday. All my actions would mean nothing if my posts on social media didn't get high exposure so that PH noticed it. I love the Indie community so much that I'd go to war for them.
 
@wizz PH is a waste these days. I don’t know why anyone bothers. The top products are clearly upvoted by spammers/cheaters (nicely done reporting them), but it’s more than that... Even legit upvotes don’t lead to sales. All PH does is ‘validate’ your idea for other indie makers who are looking for something to build. You’re just inviting competition.
 
@angelbo737 I had $5k in sales from PH.
Which is more than I expected. So there is some value there , still, but not as much as it was in 2018
 
@wizz "So the PH team actually cares, that's great."

If they actually care, you wouldn't need to do all this.

Platform owners can easily see activities, track patterns, find coordinated accounts and ban them.

Instead, they let it go unpunished, leaving thriving communities and groups of upvoters and bots to run the results for the money.
 
@sinan Right, because most people don't give a shit about PH. It's entirely a circle jerk of founders, most of whom have no actual intention of using the products on the site. Buyers are browsing G2 and to a slightly lesser extent Capterra.

OP, please tell us how much actual impact on your business all this effort resulted in.
 
@wizz I'd be willing to bet that authentic engagement on ProductHunt has fell off a cliff. PH knows it, but tolerates the bots since it makes it look like the site isn't dead. Same thing is happening to Twitter replies section. Replies to tweets used to have engaging content and discussion. Now its just a bunch of LLM bots trying to siphon a little bit of clout.
 
@wizz why not offer to build them an internal tool to use, or make a service that does this for other launchers on PH or on other platforms?

would you not have paid for the service that you just performed?
 
@joanj23 I’ll offer them, but I’m pretty sure they will reject.
So I’m thinking of making a new front end for PH that’s showing real data, not fake. If it’ll be different from PH’s own dashboard, people will use my dashboard more often than PH and PH will see traffic drop and may consider acting
 
@wizz How about building an open source version of Product Hunt, specifically for indie hackers. No VC funded babies or Spam bots allowed.
 
@jhutch77 I have built one, it’s called DevHunt.org
But it’s only for dev tools.
I do regret now that I didn’t open it for all at the start
 
@wizz PH is not google for marketing SAAS, so its good to fight on PH. But not worth the time. This will happen again and again in all channels. So better to focus on growth and customers
 
@wizz Thank you so much for informing us, I was living in a false perception, thinking l "if someone can do something for PH, then PH will do it by itself, for its own interest".

I'm launching a PH like platform for a specific technology (svelte), from what you saw at PH, what are the things I should care about to avoid having people cheating? When you speak about a "same pattern" what does that mean?

Can I reach out for more details please?
 
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