Why is it so hard to earn upvotes here?
I don't know about you but I got the feeling that people don't easily hand out upvotes here, what is your take on that?
Trending on Indie Hackers
I don't know about you but I got the feeling that people don't easily hand out upvotes here, what is your take on that?
I haven't been on IH in years, but what I'm seeing today is a huge noise to signal ratio.
There are so many posts just shilling their product, no real questions for learning, no words to share their learnings with the community, just spam. This is quite off putting. It makes it daunting to sift through looking for the good posts. It would be interesting is to see what engagement generally looks like.
Would some better, community based, moderation to downvote or flag spammy content help here? What makes HN stand the test of time? We need a @dang here
This creates a negative feedback loop. Why should I invest a bunch of time creating a quality post for IH when it is going to get lost in the noise that is "new" posts?
I am totale new to IH, I found it really cool but I got the feeling just like you have described it, its more about self promotion and less about discussion
You've already been quoted from IH on another user's website for their self promotion. It's more insideous than I thought! Did @BahauddinAziz ask for your permission? (not that it is necessarily needed since this is a public forum, it's more about politeness)
I didn't
Oh wow lol no, he didn’t ask for my permission, kinda funny, is that a bad thing?
Hey sorry for that, I didn't do it coz I didn't know, I should've asked. I'll take it down if you feel any issues with that.
No it is fine, I am even pleased to be featured :)
This comment was deleted 8 months ago.
I am about a month old member of IH, but i can imagine it beeing awesome back than
There are many quality posts but no ability(maybe no want or need) to flag low-quality spam and filter them as such. I come here for the conversation and to guide others. I wish the blatant spam would die in a fire already.
To be fair, I am here because someone told me to come here and get feedback on my product. I think it is a blurry line between shilling a product and asking for feedback :x
Totally agree with your comment.
This
Agreed.
Do you have a suggestion? I believe many people correctly pointed out what is going on wrong here, but no useful solution :)
This comment has been voted down. Click to show.
It's a combination of no moderation + the forum moving "too fast" + not enough great posts.
1. No moderation. We haven't hired a permanent moderator, and neither @ChanningAllen nor I moderate as a full-time job. This is something we'll change soon. But suffice it to say, a dedicated moderator can do quite a lot to improve the quality of the forum, which in turn, should improve upvote counts. They can coach new forum members, remove spammy posts and comments, and surface some of the best posts by pushing them to the homepage and keeping them there longer.
2. The forum moves too fast. The signal-to-noise ratio on the homepage is low right now bc the algorithm is automatically promoting too many posts. I think right now it's set to promote 15 posts per day to the homepage, but we probably only have 8-10 high-quality upvote-worthy posts per day. So I just need to slow this down. A moderator would help with this, as they would be attentive enough to constantly adjust the speed based on what they're seeing on the forum right now. I could also improve the code here a bit, but it's not the highest priority.
3. There aren't enough great posts. Some posts get lots of comments, particularly those that ask people to reply in the comments (e.g. "What are you working on this weekend?"). Some posts get lots of upvotes, particularly those that share helpful information or inspiring stories. And some posts get neither, particularly those that are self-promotional, poorly written, and/or that just ask for feedback for one person's product. The challenge is that we just don't have enough posts that share helpful info and inspiring stories. This is primarily where my focus is right now — creating a positive feedback loop to encourage people to share these types of posts, by (a) doing more to reach out and ask people to post this, and (b) working harder to promote these excellent posts on the forum, in our newsletter, on Twitter, and elsewhere.
Have you considered creating a "Posting Guidelines" so that you can nudge the community away from low quality or purely self promotion? Do you ban the worst accounts? (like those on this post that have been hidden at the bottom)
HN is doing something right, I'm sure Daniel (@dang) would be happy to talk with you about such topics. [email protected] (email is in their FAQ)
We've had stuff like that before, and even put it front-and-center in the post creation UI, but less than 1% of people read it. My theory is that people learn more from the culture (what they see others doing) than from any posted guidelines.
Guidelines are for reference. The moderators and community can point to the rules & guidelines to help others learn better etiquette. This provides a source for nudges towards improved posts and comments.
The result of this has been the deterioration of post quality and a negative feedback loop. The current state of IH is off putting.
Do you think a new experiment with guidelines and moderation is in order?
I am glad that you guys are not only paying attention but are doing something about it. I was a beneficiary of those invitations (thanks @bobburch) I love sharing stories but, like somebody already said in this thread, IH now kinda-sort of feels like Twitter with all the newsletter and info products instead of 'real' products by bootstrappers. I am not knocking anybody's hustle but there should be some sort of effort and infrastructure to maintain the quality and identity of the platform that separates it from others.
You had a growth loop - milestones! You should explore ways to bring them back and integrate them with the forum.
Founders have an incentive to post high quality content because that would give them visibility and a way to drive traffic to their product.
The milestones were rarely good enough to get good visibility, honestly. For that loop to work, we need at least a few milestones per week to be super duper good and worth reading. However in reality, the vast majority of milestone posts were about PH launches and minor feature updates. I do want to bring the milestones back, but I need to noodle on how to get people to write better posts.
To encourage people to write better posts I'd reward the best content with extra visibility. For example every day you could feature the most upvoted ones (or editorially chosen) at the top of the homepage. Kinda like the new layout I see you implemented recently but only for milestones.
I think they invites worked pretty good...
Rosie Sherry did a great job here. That was a good time to be here. I hope you can get someone like that.
An interim option is to at least do some of the simpler robotic moderation, and share that load between some volunteers. Like Stackoverflow, or Reddit - have some rules and delete/hide posts that don't meet the rules. Inform the poster how they can improve. Occasionally ban people who are obviously abusing the forum.
Indiehackers.com held a huge potential to help several indiehackers to kickstart their journey. Unfortunately, the site keeps on promoting similar names and stories for the sake of networking I guess. Trying to turn into a publication site with a few "great" editors, along with podcasts.
The latest addition that displays featured articles on top... People spent their year here. IH for some reason chose to feature people coming back a year later. That's hurtful for those who create the daily buzz here.
Not sure if it's ever going to happen but hopefully one day, the distinction between publications and forums will be more clear. Expecting "quality posts" on forums is odd. Have a place for novels and a place for people to discuss. EZ.
For some people reading those well-written articles is valuable, for others like me discussing the "Rate my landing page" post. There is more that I can learn there, more connections I can make there and it doesn't matter how repetitive it is.
I've mailed you months ago about moderation. No response. Built a site to see the comments feed at once; indiemod reported those guys along with a few others. Seeing them still around makes me wonder if there is any moderation at all. It doesn't even require doing it full-time.
When it comes to rewarding good content, that is what the indiehackers newsletter does. Manual curation of good content. In the forum, bad content/behavior should be punished instead of a few mods boosting a few creators, which already failed before.
Peace out!
I'd add:
4. No incentive to review new posts
I rarely check the Newest tab. Maybe if lurkers like me were forced to upvote at least one new post before seeing Popular posts. And not like any random new post. The upvote button would have to be available only after reading a post. I believe this would change the dynamics of upvotes.
I think this is exactly the right strategy as of now! Personally, I want IH to succeed and be a place/community that I can frequent, and share experiences. But right now it doesn't make much sense because of the noise, the spam (both users, as well as the recent ChatGPT comments).
A lot of good content never surfaces, but could only be found digging deep down into people's profiles. I don't have the data, so I don't know if other share the same feeling - but I've started to feel it is kind of pointless to do a quality post on IH since it is very likely it will not manage to reach anyone through the noise anyway.
I'm excited about the future of IH! There is a lot of good stuff that will come with focus on these points you just wrote about.
I try to report spam users as soon as I see them, but given there is no feedback I don't know if it actually results in something.
Does reporting a post as spam or low quality do something? Like for example, if a post crosses some threshold of reports, will it automatically do something or is human intervention needed?
I think there aren't great posts because of the above said reasons. If great posts are not visible and downvoted by spammers then posters will be discouraged. It's important to bring in moderators to save this community.
Completely agree with all of this! Thanks for the transparency, and actually agreeing and acknowledging there is a problem.
How can I help?
In regards of Moderation, and the trend of AI right now, wouldn't that be the best testing ground to have some kind of AI Moderator who does the job initially and a human who just signs it off?
That's basically what we have right now, but it's super primitive, just a rules engine and some nice UIs. I could certainly hook it up to GPT-4 to make it much better.
hmm it could be based of the already popular/downvoted posts? The problem I see is that it will be kind biased and "new" topics will be killed off
I think if it just kills off the posts we already know are spammy and low-effort, that'll be a huge plus. But I'm confident that there's a big enough corpus of existing good posts on IH + good posts on other forums + good articles on other media sites that the AI can draw from it without limit creativity too much for what "good" looks like.
Because Newbies like me can't upvote :(
from newbie to newbie you got a upvoted
Yea.. indiehackers isn't that harsh :)
Yes ,I was constantly trying to upvote but failed..
But newbies can still get upvotes :)
Yes indeed!
Personally I come here less and less as every post seems to be from a bunch of marketeers detailing how they made a website containing a "list of things" in 1 hour and how it's already made them x thousand dollars.
From a developer point of view I want to build and read about people building useful things not read about marketing pyramid schemes.
Exactly this. Indiehacking should be about building cool products and not about the next directory website listing or a new ChatGPT wrapper build in 2 days.
This comment was deleted 8 months ago.
I feel you but as a developer you also want to reach your target audience somehow
You earn 15 upvotes with a post that talks about not getting upvotes. Pretty ironic. Just saying 🤷
i guess i was kinda nice to the people and we are having a good discussion here about what buggles us about IH
I am totale new to IH, I found it really cool but I got the feeling just like you have described it, its more about self promotion and less about discussion
A big part of Indie Hackers is building products for other Indie Hackers in which case this is the ultimate marketing tool
Welcome here, I am a complete newbie here myself :)
What type of platform do you use for discussions instead of IH, or actually what brought you here?
I learnt about the platform from PH and people did have nice feedback referring to networking here.
It's hard to join. I signed up last week, contributed to a few threads. Just came back and I still can't post. That's prob it for me. IH doesn't have enough activity to keep me jumping hurdles to become an active member.
same.. cannot post yet
I am new here, but seems like the whole posting, commenting issue is quite common. Actually got to know about IH from Product Hunt community and thought it would be as easy here, but seems like way more complex. How have your experience with IH been so far?
I created my account 2 weeks ago. And I am active since then but still unable to create a post.
Have you managed to get any points or maybe followers?
Same situation for me too. It's pretty frustating :/ Can't upvote or post unless I've commented on enough threads, but finding a good thread amongst the spammy posts is difficult. A vicious cycle !
Same! Wanna help each other out with upvotes?
you mean IH caus at HN I had no problems
I cannot do upvotes. Do you know how many points I need to get access to those features?
Things would change if everyone focused on contributing something of value. If you don't like what you see, use your energy to do something to make it better.
Lead the way, upvote what you like. Encourage others to do the same.
Post the things you want to see or find helpful or something you've seen that you think others would appreciate.
Every little helps.
Sounds rational. Like your point.
As I am new here, can you please maybe say whether the users of IH can also be the moderators of the platform, or it's more of a users create content and discussions and those are moderated externally?
I have no idea how the moderation is done these days, which is perhaps part of the problem, having clarity would help.
There is the upvoting and down voting of comments and reporting of members/spam, it's especially helpful these days for reporting AI type stuff.
Thank you for clarification!
Still need to learn how down voting works here :D
I am doing so, I upvote/downvote what I like/dislike. Actually the "self" moderating Nature of the forum here is not bad but maybe it requires some kind of "lead" who would lead discussions in some direction. Maybe even something like on PH?
I do think a 'lead' would help.
There are too many pointless, unnecessary discussions here, so the real real issues are ignored.
What is you suggestions to make it better?
maybe the activity limit should be increased, thus the people who can share posts will be more authentic.
I go on IH pretty much every day to just seek actual answers to questions I have, read comments, and hopefully stay in touch with what other founders are doing.
I try to upvote under-appreciated questions/discussions from "Newest" that I feel would provide value if more people jumped on and answered.
Other than for getting a quick pulse check on what buzzwords are trending, I rarely look at the "Popular" post filter (which is the default, unfortunately). I always go straight to "Newest" because it's more likely people are looking for immediate help (especially if there are no comments yet). The "Popular" page is where the marketers will try to get quick traffic and might be spamming upvotes to do so XD
But yeah... I legitimately upvote multiple comments and posts on IH every day. I want it to be a platform where people can feel like they can get questions answered and where they can get upvotes if they provide good answers... so I use the upvote feature to try to enhance the visibility of well-written, value-add answers and questions for anyone actually trying to get solid information on here
I still like IH and despite its flaws, I feel there are many experienced, smart members of the community that are willing to help you out and collaborate. I joined years ago and recently came back after a lot of time building, but I would encourage new members to stick with it!
thanks for the thoughtful comment! I also like to join the Newst Tab rather than the popular.
I've been up voting posts that have really inspired or added some value to me. but they are far and few. The noise to signal ratio is the same on all channels. Everyone is trying to get attention :) Just add value and you will know you've actually added value to someone when that someone upvotes.
I get what you mean but it feels like the good ones get quite a lot of upvotes while the bad ones get almost none
why would anyone want to upvote a bad one? Its good take it, its bad ignore it - simple. There is a 3rd category - general discussions. like we are having here - where comments are fine i guess.
I understand, but what i mean is there is nothing inbetween
If you're a nobody, don't have a decent product or have a "I made my first $$$$" post, you're not likely to get any love..
The game is the game
That's really harsh, I know what you mean!
nice
I agree it's hard
people just don't pay attention to things like that.
I understand your concern about the scarcity of upvotes in this community. It could be because of the overwhelming number of spam posts that make it challenging to find genuine content worth upvoting. It would be helpful to analyze the community's engagement to understand the situation better.
It's important for users to focus on creating valuable content that adds to the community's knowledge and understanding. It would be helpful to see data on engagement trends to gain insight into what types of posts are resonating with the community.
double that, I would love to see like on reddit how many people has viewed a post or how many people have reached that post
I wonder how at first the spam makers manage to get the votes to get a chance to post here. Honestly, it looks like a lot of people are active here which is amazing, but could it be so that there are focing more on self promotion rather than discussion?
This discussion is awesome, I just want to 2nd all the comments on signal to noise ratio. That said, that applies to the "Popular" default view for the most part, there's a lot of interesting, engaging discussions in some of the niche groups here.
What do you suggest should IH become?
I don't think IH should necessarily change, I actually enjoy some of the marketing insights and discussions on that go on here – I just wanted to second that there are a lot of survivorship-bias articles as well, and they are valid also since it's fun to share in founders' success.
My point was to state that Indie Hackers is still great, especially if you venture into the site's Groups, you'll find some awesome discussions going on.
A lot of constraints for new users apparently. Also seems like most people are here to just promote their stuff, so that too...
I think the constraints are here to prevent link dumps
Seems like it, yet don't you think that just restraining people from making posts with links would make it more engagement?
Hmm it might be, who knows.
Because people share too much bs, at the end you don't need upvotes, you need people to engage in comments. Product Hunt is for upvotes.
True the more engaged Posts are the ones which land on the popular, thats something i found interesting at IH
Upvoted :)
Upvoted you my friend
No offense, but comments like these do not add to the conversation and are part of the noise problem
thanks!
Upvoted ;)
Wanna help me out with an upvote too haha? I've been waiting for weeks to be able to post!
oh thanks!
Same problem for me
Wow, now I can relate this. I just posted this
https://www.indiehackers.com/post/im-starting-a-new-group-called-first-customers-and-here-s-how-i-plan-to-use-it-1dece578c7
And several people actually followed my instruction in post, but the post itself only got 1 upvote. 😂 Maybe the button is too big to be seen? Or the label of the button should be called "Upvotes" instead of "Likes"?
New here, subscribed to this thread, and will see how I can earn upvotes fast.
I noticed this too when talking about my project. I have probably been spamming too much? It is a fine line, between sharing progress "here is my new blog post" and spamming. I tend to post when there is something genuinely new.
But given the response rates here, I will probably stop or slow that down. I think I might just come to chat in the conversations, like this one.
I get a lot more interest in my stuff on subreddits (each sub has a different culture). And that is OK: my market is probably there not here.
Upvoted👍
Have an upvote, sir
Good posts hardly get any traction and so they're quickly lost. That creates an environment where there's just no incentive to try to create good content on IH.
I wrote this a while ago: https://www.indiehackers.com/post/the-legend-who-single-handedly-made-a-7-63m-dollar-watch-2bf0aa7743
It takes hours to do the research, write it up into a story, add pics and other relevant resources, format it nicely (which is its own hell on IH), only to get 16 views and zero upvotes.
No one who's serious about business finds that a worthwhile investment. Even people that used to be big on IH don't post here anymore. The juice just isn't worth the squeeze.
On the one hand you can create an environment where it's all about self-promotion (bad), on the other, you make it like stack overflow with no self-promo allowed (also bad), so a happy medium needs to be found.
And that's a hard problem to solve.
Courtland talks about posts like these in episode 187 of the Indie Hackers Podcast. His take was that you're not providing value. People are not going to give you something for free unless they are receiving something in return. People may give you advice and recognition but only if they are learning throughout the process or could just make hem feel good.
https://open.spotify.com/episode/1CFMmH482naD55JH78rq6T?si=a1c183ca5e404cbf
I guess people like the discussion, actually this is kinda valueable, it opened a discussion that even some or the founders joined. I didn’t expect that
Well we can see here that people do like posts like this more than valuable ones 😂
lol true
It's quite easy actually. IH turned into LinkedIn of single person businesses. You can easily get upvotes with fake stories, fake success stories, status and vulnerability signalling. The last one particularly is crazy good for getting the attention you seek :) Just visit mental health group. You'll see.
Oh wow, that's quite a new piece of information. Actually got here as a recommendation from several Product Hunt contributors and could not expect it to be that much of a difference here.
Have you been on IH for a while?
I will take a look there, i guess its always about telling a good story
Truthfully I'm not sure many people are actually active on this website thus the lack of upvotes or downvotes.
Well some of the posts here get a lot of attention.
Is there any general trend or tactic for this type of posts?
Usually posts that talk about some kind of unrealistic success? I guess.
I have ideas on how to increase engagement for IH but not sure what direction the owners want to go.. I think we'll see a lot of changes in the coming weeks as they're not owned by stripe anymore (I think)
Tell me more about your ideas? I mean there are often many comments but not many upvotes
Absolutely, earning upvotes can definitely be challenging on certain platforms. It's important to remember that upvotes are typically given when a post or comment adds value to the community or sparks meaningful discussion. Sometimes, it just takes time and effort to build a reputation and establish yourself as a valuable contributor. Keep engaging with the community, sharing high-quality content, and offering thoughtful insights. Over time, you may find that upvotes become more frequent. Good luck!
I agree. As solo developers, we often face various challenges and can struggle with motivation. I believe IH should also serve as a support group for us. Sometimes, even a single upvote can be very encouraging.
Wow, never expected this big of a discussion :) thanks guys!
A few reasons:
See @csallen's post in this thread, for steps that will be taken to try to improve this
I think its because we always try to chase upvotes, what will happen if we create the best product people love and provide 100 times more value then others, people start sharing all over the communit.
for example, iron man movie, director provide us best cinematic story through iron man movie, and those people love it, share all community by making edit reels, memes and more.
if you build something you don't need to stress about upvote or anything!!
I fully agree with you. Products worth sharing will be shared. But I guess just like a lot of indie devs, it is not easy to get initial traction or even manage some kind of marketing this is why indiehackers isn't that bad. Maybe seperating self promo from discussion could also be a way
A downvote button can help to filter out low-quality or spammy content and improve the overall quality of the platform.
Also the ability to block people
because most of the posters are just dumping their own links....and don't bother with anything else...
do you have a suggestion on how to improve on the situation?
It should be again with invites
I think it's because indie hackers spend most of their time here to post not to read and vote(unlike other communities).
Indie hackers are makers and builders not curators....
It would be interesting to see the stats of IH
This comment was deleted a year ago.