Don't be fooled into thinking a couple of hours spent on a Product Hunt launch is real marketing though. You need consistent effort, not a big bang.
PH is basically a social media for selling stuff. It's a community for selling stuff. It's for the people who want to say, "hey vote for me on product hunt, I need your support!" It's something like LinkedIn. More effective than using X or getting on a podcast. There's probably better ways to market, but it works for people who aren't good at marketing.
I think the Golden Kitty awards has some value, though. Could probably end up like the GRAMMYs for product or something.
The answer with more details is: The core of Product Hunt has dead but it could continue to make money because Product Hunt has become a place where people wanting to get traffic has to go but not a website people like to visit.
In my past job, we couldn't be bothered with all these big tech politics, so we actually disabled all the third party signups. We would require phone numbers because our value proposition was validating that users were real and easier to ban. Apple was not happy with this and their Apple sign ups allowed more anonymity, just a pain overall. We couldn't enable the others on Android either, because they'd be able to sign up with FB on a Samsung then can't do it on an iPhone, and that was just messy.
