just need to vent for a minute. we launched on october 21st. we didn't buy bots or pay for some shady upvote ring. i just asked my actual friends and early network to support us.

because some of them made new accounts or used direct links, the algorithm basically shadowbanned the launch. their votes were stripped and quietly turned into followers. we ended the day sitting at position 422 with exactly one vote.

it feels like the whole ecosystem is no longer a meritocracy for indie devs. it is just a funnel to push you into buying their ads or paying agencies to game the system. play fair and you get buried.

honestly i should have just stayed on reddit.

for context, i built orb44. it is an agentless external vulnerability scanner. it looks at a SaaS perimeter exactly how an attacker does (catching bypassed Cloudflare, exposed Langfuse dashboards, public .env files) without needing credentials.…