If there are no upvotes, what dictates something being "Featured" on the homepage, the items of which are said to be the "Greatest"?

I appreciate that you've put months of effort into this project, and your site looks slick. I'm going to share some candid feedback. Not trying to be mean, but I am trying to help you think through your service's value prop and business model.

What you've actually created here is an advertising platform that helps indie hackers and startups get in front of... other bootstrappers. This is a limited audience, in size, in scope, and in available spend.

If you want to build a community, you may be better off with a Discord server and spreading through word of mouth - or something more personalized and closed like Inbox Startup if you want to monetize it. If you want to sit in the middle of the indie hacker community and collect fees on featured slots, you've got find a way to sell access to an audience that's worth $9. You're competing with product sites which are free and ad networks that give you very fine grained targeting of a wide range of audiences.

People go to sites like PH to be surprised and delighted by interesting new products. Even if the upvote system is borked, users have some faith in the wisdom of the crowd and the PH brand. Why would I, as a user, want to see a list of "everyone who had $9 to give to Filip today" over a list of "products other indie hackers thought were cool?"

Finally, a very diligent user might look at 20 products a day on a site like PH or this one. Let's say you sell out your top 20 feature slots every day. That caps you at $66K gross revenue per year... unless you raise your prices.

I built SaaSCurate. AMA.

Is the new grift to start a product-hunt style website and charge $$$ to be featured / listed? I've encountered a few of these types of websites already and they seem to be growing in numbers.

Any karma/voting system is going to have issues with bots eventually. By having the system in the first place, you crowdsource, and eventualy that crowd is going to be bots because there is always someone that can derive benefit from manipulating markets, and other related things.

Additionally, competition is important. Adversarial individual decision-making is required for economic calculation to take place. Cooperation is the anti-thesis of this, and it generally fails in ways Mises describes back in the 1930s. You can read more about it in his collected works on Socialism. It applies broadly.

The main issues you'll be immediately faced with once your reach a self-starting saturation, is controlling the noise floor. If its not useful, people won't use it.

Many of these problems don't have any good solutions. GPT makes it cost-effective to destructively manipulate aspects in ways you can't predict as well.

In my general opinion, you cannot develop or preserve community when you have bad actors taking advantage of community. This is most notably seen recently with the many LLM developers crawling any public sites available. Performing what amounts to DDOS attacks.

There can be no goodwill when the status quo is bot driven, and those bots are all about taking or imposing cost through interference.

Its a cursed problem series. Open platforms fail to the flood, Closed platforms fail to lack of engagement, and Semi-Open platforms eat up all your time for little return.