> Those who have paid even passing attention to modern productivity software will recognize the language and aim of Agenda, a project from more than 30 years ago, and therefore the broad endeavor of saving time, breaking silos, and endlessly iterating on what essentially amounts to the same few products, over and over, decade after decade.
Despite the posted title, this article is really about productivity apps and the people who use them. For each new app, they hope that this one will finally be the one that magically makes them "productive" where all the previous ones have failed. It then goes on to speculate on why they would do so and subsequently veers off into tangents on bullshit jobs, the role of middle managers in startups and (through a somewhat tortured metaphor of gaming as self-actualization) the role of leisure in the modern economy.
Fun article but not really about product hunt after the first few paragraphs.
Fun article but not really about product hunt after the first few paragraphs.
Mind fuck - product hunt is not about product hunting either.
It’s spec work. It’s not super clear that’s what it is, but the specs given to you on product hunt are the current zeitgeist. Whether you like it or not, you will build your apps for this hivemind and not for any real problem space.
> Whether you like it or not, you will build your apps for this hivemind and not for any real problem space.
That assumes the person in question gives two shits about Product Hunt. What I learned from that website is that it isn’t worth it at all. It’s procrastination. It’s a place where wannabe founders gather to look productive and cool. People actually brag about being “top hunters”. It’s cringe worthy.
Back in the real world, every time I searched for a piece of software and landed on Product Hunt, the thing is already dead less than a year after being featured. Successful products become so despite Product Hunt, not because of it. Time and again I’ve seen good products which still endure not do well on PH, while vapid VC-funded hype is praised.
On the other hand, it has become a great filter. Every time I land on a product’s website and they brag about being “Product of the Day” or whatever, it’s usually the only outside validation they can point to. It is a fantastic indicator that what the creators care about is not aligned with my values, and that they’re likely to be in it only for the profit and will abandon the software at the first sign of difficulty.
This is the truth about PH. I've had a blog post living rent free in my head for about a year called "Product Hunt is not a marketing strategy" that outlines the farce that PH is.
They pitch it as being able to get exposure from a large, varied audience, except that's not the case at all. Try launching something that doesn't have to do with AI. Go ahead, try, and let me know how it goes. :)
I was skeptical too - friends encouraged me to post my latest project there, a panoramic camera app I made entirely for my own satisfaction (I certainly used none of the “growth hacking” best practices like ads/tracking/upsell popup on first launch/excessive subscription that counts on people forgetting to turn off auto renew).
I wrote a blog article (now defunct) years ago about this, which I called "The cyclical nature of shiny new hammers". This was the basic premise. If the workforce is a bunch of carpenters and productivity apps are hammers, there will always be a subset of carpenters who chase after shiny new hammers. I do think there are productivity gains by these new hammers but they are marginal at best.
I like the analogy directionally, but I think it understates the problem significantly. A hammer is a tool used by an actual builder, the analogy for software engineers would be an IDE or perhaps certain programming languages or infra components. We've all known some practitioners who pay a little too much attention to the tools and not enough to the final output.
Productivity tools in general are for larger scale endeavors with lots of ICs. At some point you start to have stakeholders whose only job is coordination. That's where the real risk of these systems lie—when their usage is so far removed from the actual work that needs doing that feeding the system becomes its own justification.
Despite the posted title, this article is really about productivity apps and the people who use them. For each new app, they hope that this one will finally be the one that magically makes them "productive" where all the previous ones have failed. It then goes on to speculate on why they would do so and subsequently veers off into tangents on bullshit jobs, the role of middle managers in startups and (through a somewhat tortured metaphor of gaming as self-actualization) the role of leisure in the modern economy.
Fun article but not really about product hunt after the first few paragraphs.