I measured the half-life of 41,301 Show HN launches. It's 7 hours
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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
HN · launched Jul 2, 2026 · 37 upvotes (top 19%) · 0 views
Niche: startup directories and launch platforms · 246 launches, 17 in the last 7 days ▼ -45% · Explore this niche →
Category and tags
- Horizontal
- Analytics & BI
- Developer
- Not AI
- Hobby / open-source project
Visit website ↗ Source listing ↗
More like this: all 246 launches in startup directories and launch platforms →
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 : 159 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #38 of 160 (itself plus its competitors, highest first, normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 226 days after the earliest competitor.
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