Can AI copy
Product Hunt
A daily leaderboard of new products, ranked by upvotes.
Nice try
- Verdict
- Nice try
- Time to copy
- you won't
- Category
- ◎ Marketplaces & community
- Source
- Proprietary
The prompt
Written to be pasted straight into an agent with no editing. It describes the whole job, including the parts that will go wrong.
Build a daily product leaderboard. Submissions with name, tagline, description, gallery and maker attribution, entering a queue for a chosen launch date. Ranking resets daily and sorts by a score combining upvote count with time decay and voter reputation, not raw votes. Threaded comments, maker badges, and a daily digest email. Build the anti-fraud layer first: device and network fingerprinting, account-age weighting, velocity limits, and manual review flags for coordinated voting.
What copies cleanly
- A ranked list with upvotes, comments and a daily reset. This is the first exercise in most web frameworks' tutorials.
- Maker profiles, launch pages, badges, a newsletter.
Where it stops
- You will launch a leaderboard with nothing on it, and the first submitter will get to number one with two votes, which tells them the ranking is worthless.
- Vote manipulation is not an edge case, it is the primary use case for anyone who cares about the ranking. Fraud detection is the product.
- Moderation and quality control cannot be automated to the standard the audience expects.
What actually protects them
- An audience of early adopters who show up daily, which took a decade and cannot be seeded.
- Being the ranking that founders actually want to win, which is pure social consensus.
- The comment culture, which is community management, not software.
Editor's note
Sits next to Craigslist as proof that the tutorial project and the actual business share a name and nothing else.
Go and look at the original
We would rather you formed your own opinion than took ours. They built the thing; we only measured it.
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