Open Hunt

» see openhunt.co as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

Product Hunt in 2015 was the place a new app went to be born. Getting onto its front page meant traffic, sign-ups and a line in a pitch deck, and the question of how products got there was answered mostly with the word community. On 15 December 2015 a post arguing that the real answer involved a much smaller set of insiders reached Hacker News, and the comment section did what comment sections rarely do. Somebody opened a Google Form the next day titled "Let's Create a Better Product Hunt" to see who would actually build one.

Open Hunt went live on 18 December, three days after the complaint. It was a Rails app on Bootstrap with Twitter login, a posting form open to anyone, daily archive pages for every date it ran, and comment threads that the public could read. That last part was the argument: Product Hunt kept its discussion behind a login at the time, and Open Hunt's pitch was that feedback is worth more when the person who made the thing can see it and so can everybody else. The Show HN took 1,093 points and 180 comments on day one.

On 6 March 2016 the shutdown notice went up at openhunt.co, on a URL with the query string ?=shutdown hanging off the end of it, and reached Hacker News the same afternoon. Jacqueline Chu confirmed it in that thread, posted a traffic chart, and offered the code along with the production database to anyone who wanted to keep it running. That thread took 83 points, against the 1,093 the launch had taken eleven weeks earlier.

~ the dossier ~

~ seventy-nine days ~

Nothing about the shutdown was dramatic. The app worked, it was never hacked, and no lawyer sent anything. People wrote posts for a while, voted for a while, and then went back to the site they had been complaining about, because that one had the audience.

The name promised more than the code delivered, too. Open Hunt was never open source while it was alive, despite being born out of a demand for transparency, and the source only went on offer at the end, by email, to whoever wrote in.

~ what the fight was about ~

The grievance was real and it outlived the project. A ranked front page run by a private company needs editorial judgment to stay useful, that judgment is never fully explained, and every maker who does not get featured reads the gap as favoritism. Open Hunt proposed to solve it by letting everything in and letting the votes sort it out, which is the same proposal Digg and Reddit started from, and it has the same ending every time once the volume goes up.

From Ankara this was a fight about a door I was not standing at. The launch economy Product Hunt sat at the center of ran on San Francisco time and on a network of people who already knew each other, and a Turkish engineer shipping something in 2015 was not getting onto that page whichever way the curation worked. Watching the argument was still instructive. The people most convinced the gatekeeper was unnecessary spent eleven weeks finding out what the gatekeeper was doing.

~ the domain afterwards ~

A static mirror of the old daily pages answered on backup.openhunt.co into November 2016, more care than most dead sites get. The main name then went through a decline you could set a clock by: an Apache 404 complaining about a missing php.fcgi path in October 2017, a registrar page reading "Expired - domain expired" at Christmas 2020, an unrelated React app squatting there in 2022, parking subdomains in 2024. Today it serves a Namecheap notice saying the registration has expired, with a link to renew.

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