I measured the half-life of 41,301 Show HN launches. It's 7 hours
Details
- External ID
- 48759838
- Source
- HN
- Company
- —
- Product
- I measured the half-life of 41,301 Show HN launches. It's 7 hours
- Website domain
- jonno.nz
- Launched
- July 2, 2026
- Cohort
- —
- Upvotes
- 37
- Upvotes percentile
- 0.8112305854241338
- Tags
- —
- Fetched at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.
- Updated at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.
Description
I scraped every Show HN from the last 12 months (41,301 posts) plus the full comment tree of every launch with 10+ comments, ~100k comment timestamps, all from the Algolia HN API.The median launch gets 2 points and 0 comments. For launches that do get traction, half the comments they'll ever get arrive within 7.2 hours and 90% within 26, and the top decile decays on the same clock as everyone else.Vote timestamps aren't public, so comment timing is the attention proxy; caveats are in the post. Everything reproduces from the repo with one command (https://github.com/jonnonz1/hn-attention-cliff), and every number in the post maps to a named function. Keen to hear where the methodology falls short
Enrichment
- Theme
- startup launch and fundraising tools
- Vertical
- Horizontal
- Function
- Analytics & BI
- Audience
- Developer
- AI stance
- Not AI
- Project type
- Hobby / open-source project
- Normalized one-liner
- analysis of product launch lifespans
- Manually corrected
- False
Could you build this?
Yes This is an exploratory data analysis project and blog post created by pulling public data from the Algolia Hacker News API and rendering static charts.
Discussion
10 comments analyzed.
Concerns raised: Show HN posts have short lifespan, quickly disappear from front page, Difficult to get initial users without paid ads or social media expertise, Reddit requires karma points to post about apps, Too much competition for attention on HN at any given time, Show HN not designed primarily for product launches or self-promotion
Feature requests: Complementary resource with links to honest projects beyond news items, Creative sorting methods for projects since everything can't be on front page, More distribution channels beyond forum posts for launches
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one — 96 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #24 of 97 (itself plus its competitors, highest first — normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 226 days after the earliest competitor.
- I analyzed 297k HN posts · hn · 2025-12-30 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.60
- Was tired of drowning in HN comments, so I built an AI Chief of Staff · hn · 2026-01-26 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.49
- Show HN submissions have tripled since 2023 · hn · 2026-01-11 · 18 upvotes · similarity 0.47
- Analyzing 9 years of HN side projects that reached $500/month · hn · 2026-02-08 · 12 upvotes · similarity 0.46
- 20 years of Hacker News discussions, clustered and visualized · hn · 2026-03-22 · 7 upvotes · similarity 0.45
- Turning 100-plus comments HN threads into readable discussions · hn · 2026-01-02 · 20 upvotes · similarity 0.44
- I built a tool that helps predict HN front page success · hn · 2026-05-03 · 26 upvotes · similarity 0.44
- Show HN posts p/month more than doubled in the last year · hn · 2026-01-26 · 34 upvotes · similarity 0.44
Other launches for this product
- No other launches for this product.
Same idea, different domain
Nobody's really built a analytics & bi tool for Legal yet.