Building a Product Is Only Half the Job. Getting It Seen Is a Different Problem.
I created a simple experiment around this one question: what would happen if a product’s visibility was made 100% transparent? This is what I do, I spend a lot of my time writing software. AI: systems of questionable competence LLMs: random applications. All the way from full-stack products. Of course all of these can (and will) be disproved by a simple intuitive experiment. It is usually the…
Building a product is only half the job; getting it seen is a different problem. This reporter spent time writing software and experimented with product visibility. The process can be straightforward, but getting people to find your product is challenging. There are various ways to sell a product, such as building an audience, posting on social media, submitting to communities, optimizing for SEO, running ads, and getting picked up by bigger audiences.
However, none of these inherently guarantee success. The reporter wonders what factors make a product stand out and become popular, as it can vary from audience size to timing. The reporter also delves into the complexity of contemporary recommendation systems, which involve candidate retrieval, filtering, scoring, ranking, reranking, and visibility decisions.
The reporter then introduces an experiment called Get-Seen, where product rank is determined by the amount paid. This simple system eliminates factors like votes, followers, and ranking algorithms, focusing solely on the payment amount. The goal is to make the ranking mechanism transparent and easily understandable, with the highest cumulative amount holding the top spot.
The reporter believes that by making the rules explicit, users can instantly see why one product ranks above another without any guessing or hidden factors.
Written by urgent.news from Dev.to's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
