Bots Rigging Votes? Our Difficulties with Product Hunt

Question

Yesterday we launched Jobright AI and reached #1 of the day at the end of the 24-hr competition. Despite our initial success, we were later adjusted to #2. The new #1 seemingly used bots for upvotes, evident from sudden and significant increases within minutes all the day. We would like to share this detailed story and hear your thoughts.

Jobright's ranking at the end of the day: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ZWEnUZ2uyqo-LiIQ3I9NbB6nEPuO7uC1/view?usp=sharing

Our voting trajectory has been consistently smooth and gradually rising, showing a steady increase. Although there was a significant gap between us and our competitor at the beginning, but thanks to our amazing users and community, our votes began to catch up. However, every time we approached or briefly surpassed our competitor, their vote count suddenly spiked by a large number almost instantly, and our competitor’s votes surged at a bot-like speed.

Comparing Voting Trends: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1hhNuGxETypnIF7BiGZDCOSfKxuobInCJ/view?usp=sharing

Here’s a more detailed timeline that we'd love to share:

- 0:00AM - 4:00PM:  we remained consistently in the #2 position. Although there was a big gap between us and our competitor at the beginning, both our upvote numbers grew steadily.
- Around 4:00 PM, our upvote numbers started getting closer to our competitor's, at one point trailing by only 12 upvotes.
- Starting from 4 PM until the last few hours, the curve of our competitor's upvotes experienced 3 steep climbs at bot-like speed (50 - 100 upvotes within 1 minute).
- During the last few hours, thanks to the support from our friends and user community, we did our best to gather upvotes. However, our competitor continued to receive upvotes at an unusually rapid pace.

Our Competitor's 3 Steep Climbs:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1M9-tcrWOaL4mcdllIlugXLIFzKIEKJLL/view?usp=sharing

Moreover, we noticed that we have more comments than our competitor. Many of our friends and users have shown their support and shared their experiences with the PH community under our post.

The Difference in Comment Numbers: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1kY1pfk-TypF1JdFdMcLEuV7VADNH0328/view?usp=sharing

At 0:00 AM PST on July 17th, after an intense day of competition, even with our competitor using bots for their upvote, we were initially ranked first of the day. However, after Product Hunt performed a cleanup and adjustment of votes for the top products, our competitor became first while we were moved to second place.

We deeply appreciate the support from everyone who has stood by us. We trust Product Hunt to be a fair platform that celebrates genuinely creative products, but we believe our competitor’s actions have compromised the fairness of the community.

We look forward to hearing your thoughts on this matter.

jeffry rowland · Accepted Answer

Product Hunt need to look into this, to avoid bots been used as upvotes.

Ryan Liu · Answer

The timeline and evidence you've shared are very clear. It's crucial for Product Hunt to thoroughly investigate this issue and provide a valid response to ensure that Product Hunt remains a fair platform for everyone.

Answer

As a Product Hunt enthusiast, I've been following the voting situation among you. From my perspective, I'm very disappointed with PH because Blaze's vote manipulation is very obvious. Every time they are about to be overtaken, they suddenly get a lot of upvotes, allowing such products to rank first. I believe this shows that we no longer use the quality of the products as the sole criterion for ranking. Turning a blind eye to such "bot voting" behavior will greatly reduce the community's credibility. Users will question the rankings, publishers will question the quality of the community, leading to publisher loss, which in turn leads to user loss, creating a vicious cycle.

Won Park · Answer

@ericcheng26 Product Hunt emphasizes that voting is not a game, so they don't disclose their algorithm. I find this disappointing as a big fan of the Product Hunt platform. We need more information

Quanlai Li · Answer

As an active PH user, and someone who has launched multiple times on PH, I am really concerned about the intrasparency here.

Cindy XL · Answer

I urge PH to investigate and mitigate the bot situation not just against Blaze, but all the products launched on PH. If the majority of products use bots then PH votes will lose their meaning and credibility.

Jennyy · Answer

Hi Eric, Product Hunt needs to look into this. This is so unfair and Jobright deserved the #1 spot. I saw the competition yesterday, and your competitor's upvote speed is unusual. We need to make sure the community is fair.

Tony Yan · Answer

Is ProductHunt still valuable to launch a product? It sound PH is becoming a bot combating arena.

Answer

I am sorry this happened. This isn't right and I do hope PH will take the necessary steps to investigate to ensure this doesn't happen again. Regardless of the outcome, Jobright AI is an amazing tool and I feel deserves the #1 slot.

Anirudh Narayan · Answer

Well a lot of humans are also voting for the sake of voting without checking out the product. The whole thing is rigged. People are buying upvotes all the time and making sure it’s spread across the day. In the larger scheme of things how does it make a difference if you’re #1 or #2.  Did we get good feedback, did we get customers, those things should matter. Everyone trying to signal using PH is honestly a waste of time.

Henry LeGard · Answer

Great post - my company is entirely focused on bot and fake account prevention and I can assure you it’s a widespread issue on PH and other platforms.

It’s challenging to solve, but I totally agree that it isn’t fun to work super hard on a good product, pour your heart into getting users to support, and then watch it rug pulled by fraud.

Stand with you Eric!

Nicola Lanzilotto · Answer

I'm sorry to hear about your experience with the Jobright AI launch and the bot manipulation that led to your ranking being changed. It must have been incredibly frustrating, and I know this because the same thing happened with our last launch. Product Hunt positions itself as a leading destination for discovering innovative new products, but if their core metrics can be manipulated in this way, it calls the entire system into question.

Kaushik Mukherjee · Answer

How does the cleanup happen? Also if you went down does it mean that even jobwright was a benefactor of bot votes? I am only trying to understand if bots vote randomly as well? That will be worse because then we don't really know how many genuine users exist on ProductHunt and all this effort is sort of wasted.

Ashim Goldar · Answer

Usually, we aim to launch on a product hunt to gain real users, feedback, and healthy competition. Honestly, it will be a hectic week when you plan to launch on Producthut, and someone using a bot to crash your success to become number one would be a disappointment.

If this happens, the PH team must work on this issue. People trust PH launches and take all comments seriously; I do. But nowadays, most comments seem to be GhatGPT, which means standard polished comments. Also, some agencies help you gain fake upvotes, and those upvotes make no sense but create an illusion of the best in the market.

I appreciate those founders who genuinely do good things and do not fake things.

Daniel Chen · Answer

Hello,

As a fellow community member on Product Hunt, I want to extend my support and commend you for the incredible effort you and your team have put into launching Jobright AI. It's truly a testament to the power of community and the importance of genuine engagement.

The situation you've described is disheartening, to say the least. The essence of Product Hunt is its community-driven approach, where creators and users alike can celebrate innovation and creativity in a fair and transparent manner. The use of bots or any artificial means to manipulate votes undermines the integrity of the platform and the trust we place in it.

Your detailed account of the voting trajectory and the comparison with your competitor's suspicious spikes highlight a concerning trend. It's evident that your team has worked hard to earn every upvote and comment organically, which is something to be proud of. The community's support and the number of comments under your post are clear indicators of genuine interest and engagement.

I believe that Product Hunt values the spirit of fair competition and the community's voice. It's crucial that the platform takes these concerns seriously and ensures that the competition remains a level playing field for all participants.

I hope that this experience doesn't dampen your spirits or the spirit of the community. Continue to focus on the innovation and value that Jobright AI brings, and know that many of us in the community appreciate the authenticity of your efforts.

Keep pushing forward, and let's continue to support each other in this vibrant ecosystem of creators and enthusiasts.

Bots Rigging Votes? Our Difficulties with Product Hunt

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