Apparently Product Hunt now decides who will be featured?

I've launched on Product Hunt a few times now, and I saw a post on LinkedIn recently from someone claiming that Product Hunt pre-selects the products that will be picked as "Featured" before the launch even happens. I didn't believe it was true, thought it was just someone's bad experience here, but apparently it's true?? We have a unique product (which is active, functioning, with a huge community behind it), and it turns out for today's launch we weren't selected as a Featured product.. this seems very odd to me, that the odds are stacked either for or against you before you even go live. Has anyone else had experience with this? This is the last time we're launching here.