Open Hunt is shutting down

https://www.openhunt.co/?=shutdown

by tortilla • 10 years ago

83 53 10 years ago

CM302• 10 years ago

Already? Why?

Community building is a long term thing, not something you get through in a few months or so. I mean yeah, it won't be Product Hunt 2.0 right off the bat, but you need to give it more time than this.

orliesaurus• 10 years ago

I agree, lobste.rs (which is like, for those who don't know, a more focused version of hackernews) didn't give up after a couple of months and look where they are now! healthy community of highly tech focused news & commentary.

harlanlewis• 10 years ago

The ~23 items on the lobste.rs home page have a total of 18 comments.

alain94040• 10 years ago

Here's one [legally crazy] idea: there are some known great commenters here on HN. They write thoughtful comments. I'd think they would be open to having their good comments reposted on another high-quality community. So, could lobste.rs ask a few top HN commenters for the permission to cross-post their comments from HN?

Legally, it would be fine: lobster.rs would get a license, the original poster does own copyright. It's also "clean", if it's done in a manual, selective way. And boom, you get higher quality comments "for free".

Would that be completely unfair to HN?

jonas21• 10 years ago

If you disagree with their decision, you're welcome to volunteer to take OpenHunt over yourself. It sounds like they'd be happy to find someone who would be willing to do so.

CM302• 10 years ago

If I didn't have various community websites that I need to spend more time working on, I'd actually do that. But for now, it needs someone who's got the time to run it, market it, add content, etc, and I'm not that person.

Maybe they could try selling it or something? Or seeing if someone from an admin or promotion site would be willing to take it over?

mrharrison• 10 years ago

I agree this at least a one-year commitment. Please, somebody start this back up again. I also don't have the time, otherwise I would.

Reedx• 10 years ago

It had a great start[1], but died off quickly[2]. If that strong launch and big influx of users fell off (almost entirely it seems), what chance does it have of slowly reversing itself?

Momentum is vital for stuff like this. No one wants to contribute to an echo chamber. It's not very realistic that it'd regain momentum without major changes or a big sustained push from somewhere.

That said, it's not impossible that it could revive, but it's really unlikely. And once such a drop off has occurred, it's hard to stay motivated.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10759879

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10934465

bt32• 10 years ago

As CM30 suggested, the "going away" message is awfully vague. Calling the site an "experiment" might be an interesting way to forgo actual considerations like upkeep costs, but the fact remains that this "experiment" ended too early and without much reason.

At first, it seems at though Product Hunt legal went after them, but the fact they're offering to hand off the domain and the codebase itself suggests otherwise.

ikeboy2• 10 years ago

Yeah, should have used shutdownify https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10088229

bt32• 10 years ago

Oh the irony of a shutdown-service shutting down.

jacquesc6• 10 years ago

Nope, we didn't have any legal issues. Product Hunt was actually pretty supportive (and listed us https://www.producthunt.com/tech/open-hunt).

imaginenore• 10 years ago

I can't imagine that running that thing was expensive or time consuming. I would just leave it running.

unclebucknasty2• 10 years ago

There can be a lot of value in moving on.

jarnix• 10 years ago

Anyone would like to keep the service running? I could help finance/code/etc, let's keep it up!!

jeffheng• 10 years ago

@jarnix: I'll join you. What's your contact?

joeblau• 10 years ago

I'm curious as to what your motivations are to keep this up and running?

jacquesc6• 10 years ago

If someone wants to take over OpenHunt, email us at support@openhunt.co

The code and production database is available (with all the users and projects), so you'd be able pick it up right where it left off.

I was going to write up a post-mortem but haven't gotten to it yet. Anthony Franco's comment on HN was pretty spot on: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10940729

Would like to reiterate (as I said on the original launch threads on HN), OpenHunt had no animosity towards ProductHunt. The community (including me) had some critiques against how PH was being run, but instead of constantly complaining about things, we launched an experiment to see if things would be better with an open source community.

It didn't work out this go around, but I'm hopeful another team can do better.

unclebucknasty2• 10 years ago

Anthony Franco's comment was pretty spot on

Respectfully, I believe the content issue tells only a small part of the story (or is even more a symptom). The far greater challenge was that there was no notion that the audience included influencers, as does ProductHunt's audience.

That single fact creates the value of ProductHunt. It contributes to the belief that what's being posted there actually matters, which then keeps the content providers (submitters) and consumers coming back.

joshdickson• 10 years ago

I tried sending you an email, but it bounced.

factorialboy2• 10 years ago

Same here

peckrob• 10 years ago

Let me provide you with a little bit of feedback for your future projects.

You had a great launch that showed a lot of interest from the community. I still think there's room in the ecosystem for an open competitor to PH's closed model. But what did you do to capture that initial surge of visitors and bring them back? What were your plans to keep user engagement strong?

Here's an example:

When you posted this on HN 78 days ago, I asked if you had a daily summary email [0] like Product Hunt did. This is primarily how I interact with Product Hunt. An informal survey of my coworkers shows the same thing. We all read the daily email. It keeps us coming back to PH. This, IMHO, essential feature that Product Hunt had Open Hunt lacked on launch day.

For some reason I think you may have added it later, and I seem to recall I may have signed up for it. But looking through my emails I never received a single email from Open Hunt and, after awhile, I forgot it existed at all. Until today, when you announced you were shutting it down.

Engage your users. Capture visitors. Give them a reason to keep coming back and engaging with your product, or they'll forget it exists.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10762614

jacquesc6• 10 years ago

It was good advice, and I agree with you. We added email about a week later and got a couple hundred signups to it. But by then there wasnt enough traffic or submissions to really make those digests valuable.

We should have had it at launch. It still might not have been enough, but it would have been a much better shot.

factorialboy2• 10 years ago

Couldn't email you. Contact me, details in profile.

jacquesc6• 10 years ago

sorry, i messed up the dns records. jacques@forwardtrail.com will work for now

lowglow• 10 years ago

You can always join me over at Techendo (https://www.techendo.com/) making that a great community. :)

wprapido• 10 years ago

i've sent you an email, mate!

cyansmoker• 10 years ago

Actually, I tried to email that address but got this:

Google tried to deliver your message, but it was rejected by the server for the recipient domain openhunt.co by mx1.improvmx.com. [192.241.186.150].

The error that the other server returned was: 550 relay not permitted

jacquesc6• 10 years ago

Here's the traffic chart if anyone's interested :) http://cl.ly/0A3K3U0V1V0e

minimaxir2• 10 years ago

Interesting. A good barometer of the amount of traffic a front-page HN submission receives is about 100 pageviews/point. OpenHunt, with 1000+ points when it launched, only received about 15 pageviews per point. (and that's not even counting the traffic it received from Product Hunt proper, which is likely less significant.)

Maybe I have to recalibrate that particular heuristic.

tedmiston2• 10 years ago

I'd like to hear more about this. Is the 100 an observation from personal posts or analysis from some dataset?

rory096• 10 years ago

Seems likely that the heuristic would stop holding true at the high end of the vote total distribution. As a post that directly called on the HN community to take action a high percentage of readers went back and upvoted. But with 1000 points it spent the whole day on the top of the front page, so you run into the limit of the total audience reading HN in the first place.

soared3• 10 years ago

There is a similar metric for Reddit, but it really depends on the subreddit. I generally get 5 users per point on a link in a comment. Direct link I get ~20 users per point though.

soared3• 10 years ago

This is eerily similar to traffic for a site I posted here and on reddit recently. Is there a name for this kind of traffic? Looks like a huge spike from 1 source, then a small source reposts it a day or two later, then traffic completely drops off. My example is a blog though, with essentially no reason to return (posts are months apart)

http://imgur.com/e7mOrsG

mozumder• 10 years ago

This is basically the traffic profile of 99% of startups after launch.

phantom_oracle• 10 years ago

It would be interesting to have a service where you can put these types of projects into a moratorium, so that they stay in a somewhat passively-active mode to see if any other interested parties would like to take it over, instead of killing it off instantly.

tedmiston2• 10 years ago

In the spirit of openness, I have 7 invites for comment access on Product Hunt. I offer them to anyone who was active on Open Hunt or would be active on PH given the ability to comment.

To avoid making noise here, please email or tweet me [both in profile] something with "HN Product Hunt" instead of commenting. I will update with a comment once they're all accounted for.

wuliwong2• 10 years ago

I think the big product miss with OpenHunt was not showing the comments. The lack of conversation reduced it to just a list of links. I think a similar offering or even an updated re-release of this code with a visible discussion could be great. Thanks to jacquesc for giving it a great try and being so gracious to leave it open for someone else!

jacquesc6• 10 years ago

Thanks! I agree about the lack of public comments being a big mistake. We should have just thrown Disqus in there to get it started. We tried to do a weird, more complicated feedback feature and it didn't really work out.

jfoster• 10 years ago

Actually, as someone who had the same product on both OpenHunt and featured on Product Hunt, I found the OpenHunt feedback very interesting. Perhaps a more open commenting feature would've been better across general users, but you didn't completely miss the mark!

Huhty• 10 years ago

Need to spend some more time and effort getting the word out. The one and only time I heard about it was here on HN (and at the same time it was listed on PH). And I spend a lot of time reading up on business/entrepreneurship.

dragonlayout• 10 years ago

yes,is good to know.

jiten_bansal• 10 years ago

Contact me at support@betapage.co

Open Hunt is shutting down

Related Stories