Advice on how to get threads approved more on Product Hunt?
I always aim to raise topics and questions relevant to startups/products and my personal endeavors that others might relate to.
The threads usually start with an intro to the topic, my experience, and, lastly, ask others to share their experiences. I try to structure these parts into clear, error-free sections so that they are easy to read. I have never used AI, for what it's worth.
To be honest, the posting guideline that is provided to us is not that detailed. It leaves a ton of room for whoever reviewing to approve/reject however way they see fit.
Currently, out of 10 threads I submit, only 3-4 gets approved. If anyone have experience with low approval rates and was able to improve that over time, please do share with us!
Replies
@seanphwang dude... THIS.
My hit rate is even lower, and I've picked apart the guidelines in detail, making sure my posts are in line with other successful posts on the platform.
I was getting rejected for unclear reasons, so I repeatedly raised this with product hunt. We got into an email back-and-forth, and they kept saying... "just read our guidelines". So I copied the guidelines into an email and compared my recent post to each guideline, line by line. I think anyone who read my breakdown would agree my posts were in line with requirements.
They also told me to be less "engagement farmy" and "ground my posts in personal experience", so I did exactly that and reposted. No dice.
THEN, I started noticing AUTOMATED rejections. I would click "post" then INSTANTLY see a rejection notification. It was super obvious no one was reading the posts.
Only after I recorded a loom video of it happening did someone else respond and approve a few of my posts. They're saying that forums are a new-ish feature for product hunt and they are working through they're approval system, which is fair.
I just made enough noise about my posts that they got approved... with good reason. They were clearly within the guidelines and relevant to the community.
Product Hunt
@seanphwang @emikes919 sorry about this - that's a pretty bad experience. The intent with building more automated systems is to speed up approval, but it looks like maybe something went wrong here. We do regularly review automated approvals and rejections so I'm sure we'll debug this soon (and if you raised the issue, I'm sure the team is debugging our systems as well).
As a general rule, if a post is an insight that's useful to the community, or a genuine question that's useful to you (that the community can help with), it's going to make a good post.
A common failure I see is posting a question that's really general and doesn't include enough details for the community to help you answer it. E.g. "What's the best way to acquire customers?" - without saying what product you have, what you've tried, what you've learned, and what you're stuck on.
More detail is better.
minimalist phone: creating folders
I would try to pinpoint that the thread needs to spark discussion and share experiences. Not such things you can find with AI, but something that can help you connect people outside this platform. Who knows, you can have with them such a deep convo that you meet them IRL.
@busmark_w_nika While Nika I understand this, but why are some the posts getting auto-rejected is my question and honestly has been very frustrating for me.
@busmark_w_nika I think there is an issue going on with their approval system per my comment on this thread. I posted a bunch of really genuine stuff that clearly adheres to the guidelines and was getting auto-rejected. I made a ton of noise about it, then some posts got manually approved.
minimalist phone: creating folders
@emikes919 So probably raising awareness about automated approval was worth it. Now, your posting is more visible :)