Proposal: Remove Product Hunt as App Reviewer

[pstan26]

What is the problem you are seeing? Please describe.
Unclear how much value is being added by apps launching on them, and its all highly subjective.

How is this problem misaligned with goals of app mining?
As a distribution channel and reviewer, this does not seem to accelerate the adoption of high quality apps that preserve individual’s fundamental digital rights because apps when they launch aren't already in the best shape. Can imagine the product hunt launch might delay apps participating.

What is the explicit recommendation you’re looking to propose?
Remove Product Hunt in favor of more objective app reviewers.

** Describe your long term considerations in proposing this change. Please include the ways you can predict this recommendation could go wrong and possible ways mitigate.**
Unclear there are any material downsides with removing this reviewer.

Additional context
Folks try to game product hunt and we have to take Product Hunt's word that the numbers they report have been cleaned. This may be true, but since we don't know their secret sauce its hard to verify.

[jefreybulla]

I am currently participating in the App mining program and had to go through the Product Hunt process. Based on my experience, I support this proposal.

Product Hunt is a great website to discover apps that are ready for mainstream users. However, at the moment, Blockstack apps are not ready for mainstream users. Apps built with Blockstack have limited compatibility with devices and browsers. This means that the majority of Product Hunt users won't be able to try our apps. In this sense, there is no value added to the app developers or the Blockstack ecosystem.

On the other hand, the Product Hunt launch becomes a distraction for app developers. Instead of improving the apps or listening to users, they are forced to spend time getting upvotes from people that will never use their product.

[cuevasm]

Personally, I think the fact that it forces teams to think about what appeals to mainstream audiences is a huge benefit of Product Hunt as App Reviewer. I'm not sure about the compatibility issues mentioned, PH specifically tags the devices and Blockstack Apps work on all the most popular browsers, including Chrome which is 70% of the browser market. I think some forcing function to consider what people actually want and how to market it vs just building cool stuff is really important. In my opinion, other dapp ecosystems suffer from not having anything useful for normal folks or a mainstream market, whereas most apps in the Blockstack ecosystem are immediately applicable to the daily life of regular folks (document editors, blogging tools, password managers, etc.). If not PH, an App Reviewer that focuses on measuring customer validation/product market fit, is very important.

[hstove]

I think that Product Hunt is the least correlated, compared to other reviewers, of what a 'good app' is. In the beginning, it was good because it forced you to get some exposure and market your app to a more mainstream audience. Now that we have Awario, I think they do a better job at incentivizing marketing and exposure.

Product Hunt's upvotes are also the most awkward to improve. Getting a good launch is good, but we've seen that a good launch is really all that factors into your PH score. #106 slightly improves this issue, but it's still awkward. Some apps are now including their PH link in their app, but I worry that this will flag their 'non-credible' algorithm, because they're going directly to the app page and upvoting. As mentioned, we don't know their exact algorithm, so I can't be sure.

[dantrevino]

Didn't we already go through this? #73

[cryptocracy]

I fully support their removal from app mining as a reviewer for the following reasons:

• random 3rd parties can hunt your app prior to its actual launch date, eg they do 0 validation of if an app is intending/ready to launch, thus giving false presentation to would be voters.
• No monthly reviews.
• 'credible vs non-credible' secret sauce formula.
• Minimum to non exist feedback.

[ntheile]

i agree with @cryptocracy , axe ProductHunt! add a blockstack community vote!

[cuevasm]

I gotta say, I don't see how a community a. will actually work (we saw that it was a struggle to get token holders to vote already) or b. how we/they are more qualified to be ranking apps than Product Hunt's community. I actually think folks who look at PH regularly and make up their community are quite a bit more educated about what makes apps successful and where market demand is, than the Blockstack community currently is. I've noticed we all tend to be in a bit of a crypto echo-chamber (and rightfully so to some degree, not a criticism), but I don't find that overall we have more expertise or vision for this than PH's community. If I were personally building an app, validation from the PH community would mean a lot more to me as a founder/entrepreneur/developer than that of the Blockstack community at this juncture. This is to say, I think there are more qualified reviewers than ourselves, I don't really see the argument that because we're part of the community we should have some say about the quality of apps people are building - I would personally defer to actual experts and believe we could get them in here.

[ntheile]

How can you prove somebody who upvoted your app even used it...let alone made a valient effort to review it?

[cuevasm]

I am saying the same thing about a community vote - and in aggregate, I would generally say that PH is a pretty damn good proxy even if every single person isn't diving headlong into the weeds.

[ntheile]

The problem with App Reward mining is I just see a bunch of simple apps being created because Blockstack lacks a few pieces of middleware to make it easier to build full scale collaborative apps. Hank is doing a great job with Radiks but there is no monetary incentive for a community developer to help with those efforts. Instead the community developer would rather whip up a simple app that appeals to a certain demographic aimed at pleasing the App Reviewers to make a few satoshis.

P.S I love the stuff the Blockstack core devs are doing though!

[cuevasm]

I think that's probably a separate topic, but I generally think that if you reward good businesses (via App Mining) and they are growing/creating value, it eventually necessitates them building new features into Blockstack and seemingly are open to sharing that or are already open source. I do agree that direct platform development can be better incentivized but it's certainly not the purpose of App Mining.

In terms of PH, I'm definitely not here to say we should keep them, I am advocating for keeping that spirit of things in the rankings. @hstove I kind of agree that Awario starts to get at this to some degree, but I think a group of seasoned investors would be an even better replacement. They do due diligence regularly so they have the muscle for it and I would imagine have great insights for teams. A group like Y Combinator or something, I think, could do a great job ranking apps on some kind of market viability/future potential/investability score. It's really important to me that Blockstack apps don't devolve into only fun projects and cool proofs of concept and I think a big part of that is forcing ourselves to think about the market from day 1. Ultimately an app is not really sustainable if you can't build a business or community around it, both of which require a market fit of sorts.

[ntheile]

yesss and yesss on seasoned investors! y-combinator would be amazing!

[ntheile]

I think if an app had to fill out a form similar to the Y Combinator application it would easily weed out the non-serious apps. Obviously it would have to be tweaked for Blockstacks vision of user privacy but I filled out the Y Combinator form and it asked questions like this:

1. Please enter the url of a 1 minute unlisted (not private) YouTube or Youku video introducing the founder(s).
2. How far along are you?
3. Why did you pick this idea to work on? Do you have domain expertise in this area? How do you know people need what you're making?
4. What's new about what you're making? What substitutes do people resort to because it doesn't exist yet (or they don't know about it)?
5. Who are your competitors, and who might become competitors? Who do you fear most?
6. What do you understand about your business that other companies in it just don't get?
7. How do or will you make money? How much could you make?
8. How will you get users? If your idea is the type that faces a chicken-and-egg problem in the sense that it won't be attractive to users till it has a lot of users (e.g. a marketplace, a dating site, an ad network), how will you overcome that?

If you are interested I can share my answers to the questions for my app, Blockusign.

[thedavidlewis]

The investor/YC idea is great. Unfortunately, it is utopian. What’s in it for them? How are you going to get them to review 60+ apps? What happens as that number grows. We already saw that STX holder (investors of a sort) looked at few apps and rarely voted.

To Nick’s point about simple apps, that’s what TMUI guarantees. The reviewers know nothing about the app coming in and may have no interest or exposure to the industry/category the app is in. So a simple, single use app will do better. (Note: That said, we find the reviews and comments very useful in refining our messaging which is the real value for us.)

I wonder if there will be an App Reviewer that will be good enough. I don’t think so. That’s why I like the Decay/Growth proposal. It makes PH a more useful and more fair metric. We should work on improving them. Otherwise, app miners will be spending time trying to figure out how app mining works every month as app reviewers are added and removed.

[ntheile]

There actually is a lot in it for an investor. Investors sit in pitches all the time, I see it no different than reviewing 60+ apps. If an app is not worth an investors time, then it probably is not worth an App Mining award. If an investor see's an app that has potential he votes for it, thus bootstrapping the app in its early stages. Once the app hits a certain level of maturity the investor might actually put his own money into the app or team behind it after it matures to a real product.

Also here is a quote from the "App rewards Mining" white paper:

App Reviewers for the first year term, after the network goes live, need to be
part of the genesis block i.e., they need to become economic stakeholders of the
ecosystem as the first step. They must use the associated private key of their
ownership address in the genesis block to perform curation operations

So far I am unaware of any App Reviewers (especially on producthunt) that are economic stakeholders in the ecosystem. The Democracy Earth voters had a stake but apparently not enough of them voted. So I think the problem that needs to be solved it how to incentivize the investors to vote. Just to spitball... If they are already accredited investors then why not incentive them to vote by giving them tokens or something? It worked for me when I was new to the community, I used XPO.Network, https://contribute.blockstack.org, to earn Bitcoin for testing Stealthy, Graphite and Misthos...and I had a lot of fun doing it.

[thedavidlewis]

That sounds really good but, again, it’s utopian. How many apps is any investor going to look at with hopes that they may grow to be big enough?

To get an investor to look at your company to consider an investment or watch it for the future, there are filters. Usually that is a warm intro but it could be a creative way you got to them that impressed them. Just being an app miner likely won’t meet that threshold for most investors.

So let’s say they start looking, they will be more likely to look at apps that have already received accolades from others. Remember, most investors follow on... few lead. That means the top apps will remain the top apps. And if the investors are known, the apps that can get a warm intro will be the ones who succeed.

My definition of a utopian system is one that sounds fantastic until you put people into it. So far, almost every app reviewer that has been used or proposed is not perfect because they are all utopian. People muck them up. That’s why I think we should see if we can find guard rails to improve them until someone comes up with a viable app reviewer that isn’t utopian.

[friedger]

I just saw a mention of PH in a chat where the user appreciated that blockstack apps are validated by popular platforms like PH.

So far, almost every app reviewer that has been used or proposed is not perfect
Therefore, we should try to increase the number of app reviewers, not reducing them. Please keep PH until there is a replacement for it.

I like the PH with the improved scoring.

[jyudkin1]

I agree - I think PH has the best community (it's not perfect) for recognizing early products and providing feedback. The community is pretty much early adopters, willing to accept not perfect products, think engineers, designers, investors, etc people who care about the long term viability of a product.

If you post in more general channels - think Reddit, you get attacked for every edge-case, its not constructive, and many times you get trolled with feedback that is not necessary.

While PH is not a perfect partner, its the closest that I know of that will give feedback (ongoing) and distribution (users / testers).

[stackatron]

Proposal: Let the new scoring marinade for a bit. If there is still a problem here we can always revisit and discuss removal. Good on this?

There are some other interesting ideas in the thread, can folks please start new tickets for those?

[stackatron]

I was referencing #106 please comment on that.