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New forum guidelines
The Product hunt community is amazing, and I know there's lots of knowledge to share. I want to make the forums the most vibrant forums for product builders on the internet!
To that end we've re-designed forums, defined sub-forums, and introduced product-specific forums, and we've drafted new guidelines to keep the discussions vibrant, authentic, and genuinely useful.
The new guidelines are here - https://help.producthunt.com/en/... - you can read them in full, but here's my summary:
When posting a new forum thread, ask yourself:
1) Is this a genuine question I have that I want the community to answer? 2) Is this an insight that will be helpful to other builders and product geeks?
If the answer isn't a confident "Yes" to one of those, don't post the thread. As an addendum to 1: When posting a question, please provide enough detail for the community to answer your question. Instead of: Subject: Analytics tools Post: "What's the best analytics tool for startups? do this: Subject: Analytics tools Post: I built a note-taking app, , and we launched 6 months ago. I'm trying to understand user behavior and I've been using for analytics. I'm considering switching to something like Mixpanel or Metabase. What do other people use for user behavior analytics? What other questions should I be asking?24
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Rohan Chaubey
I mod r/GrowthHacking alongside Ryan Holiday (60K members, 1M+ impressions annually), majority of our new members do not understand which flair to use on their posts. So we used to tag them manually while moderation.
I believe topics are equivalent of flairs at PH. How does PH team ensure everyone selects the right categories? Example, a self-promotion post that says they are launching on PH next month can be categorised under general instead of self promotion. Does the PH team change the categories?
Suggestion for product forums: Currently the utility of product forums is a bit unclear. Example, p/voicenotes just has their launch post under the forum.
Maybe PH team or any active PH user / power users of the products or the makers of these products can be appointed as mods of the product forums and their role could be to engage users, encourage participation and produce content related to the product.
This is similar to unpaid mods of Reddit subreddit. This will ensure the product forums stay active long-term by delegating management to power users or product owners while PH team still is in control just like Reddit admins have super access over mods of specific subreddits.
Not to mention, this improves SEO for Product Hunt. People searching for product related queries may end up discovering the threads on PH.
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I'd suggest renaming the "Self-promotion" sub-forum to something like "Your products and projects"
* If we talk about our own products that's not necessarily primarily self-promotion, we may e.g. just want to give insights or connect with others working on similar things
* I think no one really wants to watch others "promote themselves", instead we want to get insights into their projects etc.
* "Self-promotion" simply has kind of a negative connotation
* The guidelines discourage self-promotion
Is there a reason not to introduce more specific forums like
* Technical
* Marketing
* Business
* Big questions
* Personal
* PH launch?
Would sure make it easier for people to find what they're interested in...
@konrad_sx I meant it to be a bit humorous. We should all be self-promoting and getting better at telling our products’ story!
But the feedback is noted.
As for sub forums, we’ll eventually get there but for now I think it’s more interesting to have the bulk of the product conversation in either general or product subforums.
@rajiv_ayyangar I see ... I fear I'm lacking humor then :( sorry!
I agree that it also has advantages to have one large instead of many small forums.
(one could of course also have the best of both approaches: Require posts to be tagged with a specific "subtopic" and have filters for them)
@chrismessina we're working on a "Report" feature. In the meantime you can send a link to hello@
@chrismessina you can now report comments via "Report" or forum threads via the three dots by the initial post.
A welcoming revamp, @rajiv_ayyangar! Kudos, PH team 👏🏽 Have been waiting for something like this for quite a while. Looking forward to great discussions!
@neelptl2602 looks like it. But I think PH would do better than Reddit😃
@neelptl2602 certainly we've taken inspiration from some elements of Reddit!
thanks for the new guidelines! Just a question, how can we find specific threads? I haven't been able to find a search tool for that in the page
Thanks for sharing! Just one suggestion:
Could the PH Team add a 'search thread' function to the page? The current search button in the upper left corner only allows searching for products and users, not threads...
