This content originally appeared on DEV Community and was authored by Thomas Hansen
Everybody who knows anything about ProductHunt, knows it's filled exclusively with marketing managers and click leeches.
You can see this by nobody really caring about having an actual discussion, which shows by everybody asking questions. The idea behind this is to artificially inflate their followers and engagement, to generate "karma", such that they'll have more pull during launch day.
By phrasing your original discussion as a question, the probability of that somebody will engage with your discussion increases, resulting in artificially inflating your "karma" by gaming the system
This has nothing to do with AI, and ProductHunt has always been like this.
Buying upvotes
In addition it's an "open secret" that there's no way you can reach the top for a product launch without buying upvotes. There's an entire industry of people willing to sell you upvotes. I would know, because I had 10 offers yesterday during our own launch day. Below is one example.
This results in that every single launch winner is unwillingly participating in, and subsidising, human trafficking and slavery-like click farms.
For the record, I didn't buy a single upvote - Something you can see by our product having 13 upvotes.
Slavery-like Click Farms
When you buy upvotes for your product, you're purchasing services from click farms in 3rd world countries. A lot of these click farms are literally abducting teenagers from their families, by luring them in with false promises of good jobs with good salaries, for then to have them fly to a different country, and steal their passports as they start their jobs.
Their job is sitting like Sardines for 80 hours per week, clicking 500+ links per hour, for then to do some "action". For ProductHunt this implies upvoting the product, and possibly copying and pasting some comment given to them by their manager in some Excel sheet or something. The advanced ones might scrape the product launch page, and maybe use AI to generate a relevant comment. Something I've demonstrated how you can do in one of my previous videos.
Most of these click farms demands 80+ hours of work per week from their employees. Some of them will forcibly deny their staff to leave the factory, sometimes with armed guards. And all of them will pay minimum wage, if they even pay any salary at all. There are historical accounts of employees having been able to escape their slavery facility, for then to go to the police, which arrested them, detained them, and returned the escaped workers back to the factory owner.
This is such a huge problem that the Chinese government has issued "travel warnings" to their citizens for specific countries. Hundreds of thousands of Chinese teenagers have been abducted this way, working under slave-like working conditions, 80 hours per week, some of whom are upvoting your product launch.
Basically, it's modern slavery, and there are hundreds of thousands of teenagers working under such conditions in south east Asia
ProductHunt is unwillingly subsidising Slavery
By ProductHunt not being willing or able to deal with this, ProductHunt is unwillingly subsidising modern slavery. YOU as a marketing manager is also subsidising such slavery by purchasing upvotes from people such as the guy in the above screenshot.
The above guy is of course just a sales executive, and would probably deny the allegations I put forth in this article if confronted with it - But the problem is so large that the Chinese government publicly warned its young citizens to travel to specific countries because of the risk of being abducted and sold into slavery to such click farms.
When the CCP warns about slavery, you know it's bad!
YOU are Subsidising Slavery
In addition, you are subsidising slavery by purchasing upvotes from click farms such as these. Not only are you subsidising slavery, but you're also subsidising the same companies that are maliciously destroying your ad campaigns, by using the Google Ads Display Network feature to click farm harvest clicks from Google Ads, resulting in 70% commission from Google on ads displayed on their shallow websites, exclusively created to take advantage of Google's commission for clicks generated on their web pages.
Yes that's right, you're paying the same people that are destroying your ad campaigns!
The reasons are simple; These click farms have a portfolio of products, and upvotes on ProductHunt is just one of their products!
Google is Subsidising Slavery
In addition to these problems, Google is also ipso facto subsidising slavery. The method is simple to understand, and goes as follows.
- You setup a shallow one page website with a JavaScript snippet displaying Google Search results, in addition to Google Ads
- You apply to become a "Google Partner" (new speak for "slave manager"), resulting in 70% commission on all ads clicked on your page
- You abduct 5,000 teenagers and force them into slavery
- You send these slaves an excel sheet of 5,000 links per day they need to click on, for then to click on every single ad they can find on that page
- The slavery owner earns thousands of dollars per day in "affiliate commission" from Google
Since CPC is sometimes between 2 to 15 dollars for each click, and each slave can typically click on 500+ links per hour, this implies the slavery owner makes between $1,000 to $7,500 per hour for each slave he has abducted, while usually not giving more than $1 in salary, if even that to his slaves doing the actual work.
This is an industry generating hundreds of billions of dollars annually!
The end result becomes that you're wasting sometimes 80 to 98 percent of your advertisement budget, while subsidising slavery-like click farms in South East Asia, resulting in unfathomable amounts of suffering and grief.
All of this because you bought 400 upvotes from the guy in the above screenshot
The fix to the problem
The solution is quite easy to fix; Stop purchasing upvotes and clicks! Which leaves you with a new problem; "How can you increase angagement on your ProductHunt launch?"
Well, it's a slight more demanding job - But in the following YouTube video I illustrate how I added 50 new followers to my ProductHunt profile with 5 minutes of work, by intelligently using AI. These followers will be organic followers, as in actual human beings, often having a legitimate interest in new products and new launches.
The above illustrate a solution that allows you to organically grow your ProductHunt profile, resulting in more followers, that will be notified 1 to 2 months down the road as you launch your next product. Increasing the probability of that your launch will actually be successful.
Since these are legitimate human beings too, it's more likely they will actually share your launch to their network, increasing the quality and amounts of customers you can get from your launch campaign, probably by 10x to 1,000x.
It's more work, it requires more planning, but it will probably bring you 100x better results
After all, what's the point of winning "Best product of the day" when the only ones who actually saw it were click farm employees?
Let AI Free the Slaves
There's been a lot of talk lately of how AI will steal your job. I'm not going to go down that rabbot hole, except for informing you about that there are hundreds of thousands of teenagers living in slavery today. I'm willing to bet a kidney on that all of these would be more than happy to have "the AI steal their jobs", such that they could be released and sent back to their families.
AINIRO is a company, and we're dependent upon selling products and services. However, nothing brings me greater pleasure than when we can combine our ability to earn money with positively contributing to society. If you're interested in helping us, while also helping yourself, and maybe even help some abducted slaves in South East Asia at the same time - You can contact us below.
Happy Hunting 😊
And yes, the comment I posted at ProductHunt for this particular link was AI generated 😁
This content originally appeared on DEV Community and was authored by Thomas Hansen
Thomas Hansen | Sciencx (2024-07-03T09:16:58+00:00) How I got 50 Followers on ProductHunt in 5 Minutes using AI. Retrieved from https://www.scien.cx/2024/07/03/how-i-got-50-followers-on-producthunt-in-5-minutes-using-ai/
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