I submitted my startup two days ago by myself, as someone who didn't have any PH "karma", but I somehow was granted permissions for submitting products (probably because I was subscribed to a newsletter for a long time). I asked by email if it's ok if I submit my startup by myself. I was told it's ok and wished good luck.
On the launch day my site received literally five visits (in the first hours, probably a few more later). It was dead from the start and didn't get a real chance to be seen by the community. Lesson for everyone: under no circumstances have your product submitted to PH by a non-mod account.
I'm actually not angry at PH. They have their rules which are obviously working. The "elitist" model is working (to some degree at least). My fault was that I didn't follow the guides which mention what I learned. And I think they should give a warning when submitting a product by an account like mine, because there's no practical chance such product will be visible.
Just to provide a counterpoint, I submitted a pretty simple Chrome extension 2 months ago and got 270 upvotes and around 2k visits to it's website. It ended up no. 6 for the day so almost made it in the daily newsletter. It was my first time submitting anything, was pretty much inactive before it and all the promotion I did at the time was tweeting to my 400 followers.
That must be the difference (or I was blocked by some filter). I didn't try to make a social-media call-for-action, because I didn't want to trigger voting-ring protections.
EDIT. As for the filters... PH doesn't allow comments which include "ps aux" or "curl" strings. I learned this by studying HTTP responses using Developer Tools, because the error was not signalled in PH's UI :).
It IS possible to get lucky on content aggregation sites without any magic. I've had this happen for me in several places – HN, Reddit, Medium. But it's very hit and miss. You can post something great and have it totally miss 9 out of 10 times. Most people aren't interested in sifting through the new stuff – they just want to engage with whatever's already popular. If even 5-10% of a community was committed to rigorously assessing new submissions, then quality would rise to the top – but most people tend to just upvote whatever is already on the up-and-up.
This "Mathew effect" is the case with a lot of things – book deals and record deals, for instance. Unknown artists occasionally do get their big breaks by being in the right place at the right time. But if you're managing one (even if it's yourself), it makes sense to improve your odds by being systematic, and yes, basically cosying up to the gatekeepers whoever they are.
I think PH is different because it seems that if a superuser/mod will not upvote an item, it will be practically dead. On HN/Reddit/Medium you will always get at least 20-50 views. On PH I got 5. It's even more stark when you count the fact that top PH submissions get many more views than on HN/Reddit/Medium.
> They have their rules which are obviously working.
Their comment section doesnt work. It feels like stumbling into North Korea or Stepford, Connecticut along with some Idol worship. I dont know if ive been anywhere moderated that strictly, with such low insight dense comments.
As a counter-example, someone posted our product on PH and we only noticed when we saw a spike in signups and had a look at where they were coming from. It ended up being #1 that day and still is the main source of signups.
I don't have a PH account myself though and never go to that website, it was pretty bad in terms of design/UX.
The same happened here. One of the mods found our product and put it on PH. We just had a signup button, but there was no activity that a signed in user could do. People still signed up. Who posts your product on PH matters, I think. If we had posted it ourself it would have looked pretty sad.
On the launch day my site received literally five visits (in the first hours, probably a few more later). It was dead from the start and didn't get a real chance to be seen by the community. Lesson for everyone: under no circumstances have your product submitted to PH by a non-mod account.
I'm actually not angry at PH. They have their rules which are obviously working. The "elitist" model is working (to some degree at least). My fault was that I didn't follow the guides which mention what I learned. And I think they should give a warning when submitting a product by an account like mine, because there's no practical chance such product will be visible.