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Build in public is not inherently spam. In a Product Hunt discussion, Forg founder Kumar Kislay argues that it becomes frustrating when builders repeat promotional milestones without giving readers useful lessons, context, or insight. His proposed fix is to reward contribution before promotion—but the discussion does not show that Forg’s approach has measurably reduced spam or improved its feed.
What Kislay means by build-in-public spam
Kislay describes a shift from sharing the real work of building a product to following a content formula: announce an idea, post progress milestones, launch, then publish retrospective lessons. The problem, in his view, is not that founders talk about their products. It is that repetitive updates can ask for attention without offering much that helps other builders or readers.
He does not argue that sharing progress is inherently bad. In a reply, he endorses posting genuine lessons and mistakes, and identifies aggressive, repetitive promotion as the issue. A commenter frames the failure mode as treating build-in-public “as a distribution hack instead of a way to share genuine experiences.” These are opinions in the thread, not findings from a representative study.
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Kislay’s argument is that platform incentives shape what people post. If a feed rewards frequent posting without distinguishing announcements from useful contributions, creators have reason to repeat content designed to get reach. He sums up his view with, “The algorithm is not a neutral tool. It is a values statement.” That is his framing of platform responsibility, not an independently established finding about how any particular algorithm works.
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He says Forg’s feed shifted to prioritize technical insights, honest lessons, and useful opinions. Product launches still have a place, he argues, after a builder has established a presence through contributions. The discussion does not explain how Forg ranks posts or report whether the change reduced spam or improved readers’ experience, so this should be understood as Forg’s stated approach—not a demonstrated outcome.
How to share progress without making it promotion-only
Kislay’s advice is to make the learning legible to someone who does not already care about the product. Instead of posting only that a milestone happened, explain what you learned, why a technical decision was difficult, what failed, or what might help another builder. His principle is: “earn reach by contributing value, not by promoting yourself.” That is an editorial recommendation, not a promise of audience growth.
The distinction can be applied as a practical editorial framework, not a validated scoring system:
| Question | More useful contribution | Promotion-only risk |
|---|---|---|
| Reader value | Does the post explain a specific lesson, decision, failure, or useful opinion? | Does it announce progress without giving readers information beyond the announcement? |
| Promotional frequency | Is a launch update occasional and tied to a meaningful event? | Are similar milestone posts repeated without adding new insight? |
| Contribution history | Has the builder participated with useful posts before asking for attention? | Does promotion appear without context or prior contribution? |
A launch announcement can still be appropriate. The distinction Kislay draws is whether it follows useful participation and gives the audience a reason to care, rather than taking the place of contribution.
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What evidence does—and does not—support the concern
The Product Hunt thread contains no dataset, survey, or measured result showing that build-in-public posts have become spam, that a particular feed has poor signal-to-noise, or that Forg’s feed change worked. Kislay’s diagnosis is a first-person argument about community incentives and posting quality.
Related studies provide context, but they do not directly test his claim. An American Marketing Association summary of a Journal of Interactive Marketing study covering 14,311,145 Instagram posts by 6,079 influencers across 57 countries says that posting more frequently is associated with faster growth, but volume alone has diminishing returns; repetitive content and frequent advertising are associated with slower growth. Influencer growth data is not direct evidence about build-in-public forums or their feed algorithms. Read the American Marketing Association summary.
Rank #4
- ISBN: 9781260566437 is an International Student Edition of Product Design and Development 7th Edition by: Karl Ulrich and Steven Eppinger and Maria C. Yang. This ISBN: 9781260566437 is Textbook only. It will not come with online access code. Online Access code (should only be purchased when required by an instructor ) sold separately at other ISBN The content of of this title on all formats are the same.
- ISBN: 9781260566437 is an International Student Edition of Product Design and Development 7th Edition by: Karl Ulrich and Steven Eppinger and Maria C. Yang. This ISBN: 9781260566437 is Textbook only. It will not come with online access code. Online Access code (should only be purchased when required by an instructor ) sold separately at other ISBN The content of of this title on all formats are the same.
A 2026 Academy of Management Proceedings abstract reports three preregistered experiments and one archival study involving 685 MBA students’ LinkedIn use. It says professional social networks foster more permissive self-promotion norms than face-to-face settings, while exceeding those norms brings reputational penalties. That evidence concerns a specific population and setting; it does not establish how users judge build-in-public posts on Product Hunt or Forg. Read the Academy of Management Proceedings abstract.
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The thread’s central question is not whether founders should promote their work. It is how a community can tell useful learning apart from posts written mainly for reach. Kislay’s answer is to make contribution the basis for attention and place launch announcements in that context. Whether a platform can reliably make that distinction—or whether a feed policy improves the experience—remains unproven by the discussion.
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