I hurriedly set up my MacBook, and steadied my halo light to the rear of it, got comfortable, then opened the Product Hunt 2021 Golden Kitty Awards livestream in my browser. It was January 27th and the Product Hunt Product of the Year Awards livestream (otherwise known as the Golden Kitty Awards — a nod to PH’s Google Glasses-wearing feline mascot, no doubt) had just started. This was all in anticipation of Uhive winning the Web3 Product of the Year, and I wanted Uhive to be represented when the show’s hosts Greg Isenberg and Sahil Bloom, hosts of the “Where it Happens” podcast!, announced Uhive as the winner. Why so confident, you might ask? More on that later.
Ever since Uhive had launched on Product Hunt in 2021, I’d been quite fond of the platform and LOVED the fact that all the products were (supposedly) driven by community-based promotion and discovery. Much like Uhive’s decentralization protocols, this sounded similar. So, when I received an email in January announcing Uhive was selected amongst thousands of products to be shortlisted for PH’s Product of the Year Web3 Award, I was pretty darn excited!
In the email sent by PH they stated that voting for the awards’ winners would be via a public vote, and the email continued to share the link to the voting page featuring Uhive and the other Web3 nominees, with a suggestion to “share the link with our entire community” no doubt to spread the good news; but more importantly — collect votes for Uhive. And that we did.
We engaged our AMAZING Uhive global Ambassadors to share the voting link with their respective Uhive communities and we also sent out an email blast to our subscriber-base asking those who wished to vote for Uhive to follow the link and click on the ‘upvote’. We realized that having to sign up to PH’s platform, as a precursor to being able to click the upvote, might put off a ton of people from voting, but at the time, we thought it was a valid mechanism for ensuring fair-play since ‘fake votes’ would be more difficult to make.
The Uhive marketing team diligently checked the votes Uhive had on PH before the campaign started and consistently every day, for the several days the voting campaign ran. We also cross-checked the new votes each one of our competitors were earning during voting. To keep it short — Uhive had the most new upvotes during the voting campaign, by quite a margin. Going into the campaign we had just shy of 1,000 upvotes (these votes were not eligible for the awards). By the time voting ended we had just over 1,500 new votes. Our closest rival had ~1,200 (who, incidentally made the top-five finalists).
And that’s why, as I sat there poised for Uhive’s moment in the spotlight, I was 100% certain we had won — after all, the PH team had explicitly stated that the winners were ONLY selected via the public voting mechanism. I even asked them during a DM chat with one of their staff, as the ceremony was being livestreamed, if the winners were only chosen by the number of votes they received by the public — “YES”, was the answer. These votes were displayed publicly on our product pages on PH, and they were going up in real-time as campaign voting was underway — everyone could see who was ‘in-the-lead’ as long as they paid attention to the number of new votes only. And that’s why hundreds of Uhive’s followers on our social media accounts, who had been watching the campaign, were congratulating us on winning Web3 Product of the Year when voting ended!
Not soon after the livestream started, I discovered Uhive was not even listed as a top-five finalist, and I knew our community’s efforts, our Ambassadors’, the Uhive team, had all been for nothing… at least, for Uhive, anyway. Who had benefited at this point were Product Hunt, who so far had garnered ~2,500 new users via Uhive’s participation on their platform, >1,500 of whom had been a direct result of the awards’ voting. At first I couldn’t understand why it appeared to be a complete whitewash of Uhive’s win, why were we passed over? After all, we had done everything right; we rallied our community, followed the campaign, and waited to participate in the show’s livestream (some winners didn’t even bother to show up).
Eventually, when the ‘winner’ of our category was announced, it hit me — it appeared, to me at least, PH weren’t looking for the most voted-for-by-the-community product, they were looking for those products that were the most high-profile (no doubt to raise the profile of their ‘awards’ and subsequently — brand). And that’s exactly who won. A product that had featured in international news, making headlines for weeks leading up to the campaign. A product, which by our team’s count, wasn’t even in the top-five products for our category when voting ended. I’m certainly not trying to take anything away from the announced winner, but credit should be given where credit is due. If an event (or, say— entire platform) is promoting itself as a transparent and community-driven initiative, the results should live up to these promises.
And that’s why I’m writing this blog — to draw some attention to the (what we believe) massive disservice Product Hunt have done to supporters of the community-driven, and decentralized movements. And, we owed our own community an explanation. You guys are the greatest!
I reached our via DM to a PH member of staff, outlining the above and looking for some answers — they never replied.
