Growth · alternatives · 2026
24 alternatives to Forum where posts slowly disappear unless interacted with
I'm always nervous to post online (this is my very first HN post), so I built an anonymous forum where posts are automatically deleted after 24 hours. Every upvote or comment resets the clock. Some things I like about this concept: - The sheer volume of information on the internet is overwhelming - disappearing.chat keeps that volume low - Unpopular content slowly fades away, so you can visually watch bad takes disappear - Content is always fresh because even popular things will eventually stop getting interaction - Takes the pressure off that your content is going to stick around forever…
Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes. Forum where posts slowly disappear unless interacted with launched in 2024; newer entries below may have overtaken it.
- 1
I built this last year but never posted it anywhere, but now with Reddit hiatus it seems like the right time to give it a shot. The main goal of zsync is to foster high quality content and discussion. That's it. If it can't accomplish that, then to me it is a failure. I watched Reddit go from having high quality discussion in 2008-9 to devolving into the PC meme dumpster it is today [1]. HN still has the highest discussion quality of any "forum" I know of, but (1) it can sometimes randomly be very hostile/toxic to new tech, the most glaring example being crypto. (2) HN is basically a…
2023 · zsync.xyz · its alternatives →
- 2
This site will self-destruct if it goes 24hrs without a post
2020 · thiswebsitewillselfdestruct.com · its alternatives →
- 3RH
Link: https://www.reddit.com/r/hnblogs/ Old Reddit Link: https://old.reddit.com/r/hnblogs/ Hi HN, Inspired by this post earlier this week: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23237559, I thought we could make blog discovery easier by having a place to find interesting, unusual, niche, or really any kind of non-marketing blogs that are posted by the people that write them. There are a ton of interesting blogs on the web, probably more than there were when the web was new, but even though there's more they're a smaller…
2020 · its alternatives →
- 4
Overlead▲146Here's the problem: I launched two products. I wrote blog posts. I posted on X, built in public. I tried running ads. And you know what actually got me customers? Replying to someone on Reddit who asked, "What's the best tool for this?" One reply. Three signups. I felt like an idiot for not doing it sooner. But here's the issue: I don't have time to refresh Reddit all day looking for these posts. I have products to build. Bugs to fix. Emails to answer. Life to live. So I built Overlead to do the searching for me. Overlead scans Reddit, Quora, and Hacker News (and many more to come) for…
Feb 2026 · overlead.co · its alternatives →
- 5
Hi HN, this talk represents a summary of my work over the last four years on addressing shadow moderation with Reveddit. Let me know what you think, good or bad, and I'll do my best to answer. What is shadow moderation? It is any action taken against your content that you aren't told about and aren't able to detect while logged in. I focus on Reddit comments since every single removal is shadow removed— removed comments are shown to you as if they're not. You can try this for yourself on, https://www.reveddit.com…
2022 · cantsayanything.win · its alternatives →
- 6
Clinging to your visitor, even if they lost the internet.
2016 · wordpress.org · its alternatives →
- 7FH
Hi HN! I’ve been lurking for a while, but out of fear of being steamrolled by HN readers or maybe just natural introversion, I’ve always been too scared to post or comment. Which is why 1. this is my first real Hacker News submission 2. my friend Michael and I built "Fake" Hacker News, a place to post and see what AI-generated HN comments might say. Here’s a video of me using fakeHN to test this very submission: https://www.loom.com/share/4b9f4f9d7c77489a86baeb92ec55a1ed?... And an example of one of our generated posts:…
2023 · fakehn.com · its alternatives →
- 8DA
I built Discuo, a unique discussion platform that combines: - Infinite thread branching: conversations evolve naturally in multiple directions - 24h post lifespan: all content auto-deletes after 24 hours - No account needed: just start posting or commenting instantly - Complete anonymity: no tracking, no personal data collection - Minimalist design: distraction-free, focused on pure discussion Originally created for developers to share progress and discuss code, it evolved into a platform covering various topics while maintaining its minimalist essence.
2025 · discuo.com · its alternatives →
- 9
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…
Jul 2026 · jonno.nz · its alternatives →
- 10AN
Checking on some old material to provide some cross-referencing[1] I got this message: We've temporarily limited requests for old items. I've always taken it for granted that HN contained useful information that I'd be able to retrieve whenever I found the need, but this has brought me up short. Perhaps older discussions will eventually become unavailable. Will Google cache still have them? Will the Wayback machine still have them? How convenient will they be to find in the future. Probably this is a temporary glitch to prevent some overly enthusiastic crawler from bringing the site to a…
2012 · its alternatives →
- 11
Creator here. In a nutshell this extension is a "Like / Dislike" system but for website results. I miss the days of things like the YouTube dislike bar, where you can quickly assess if something is good or not. Currently sitting at ~90 users. To get it off the ground I've scraped the last year of HN to make a set of good links, and used a few content farm blacklists to make a set of bad links. Right now it's semi-useful and should only get better with time. There are some simple measures in place to prevent spam & abuse, but will cross that bridge if it ever comes. All feedback welcome!
2023 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 12
This server started a few weeks ago via some HN comments. It's very unofficial! There'll probably be some negative comments about discord. I know that many people dislike discord. (Side note: I hope more founders build discord alternatives) If you're active on discord and would like a HN channel, feel free to join. The server has the same guidelines as HN: > On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity. > Off-Topic:…
2023 · discord.com · its alternatives →
- 13
I've gotten more and more of these and A. I'm often not interested and B. they upset me more often than not. Since Reddit randomizes class-names and runs recommendations under different names this was more tricky than expected but it works reliably now.
2023 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 14
2013 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 15
I'm a solo dev. A few years ago, I got addicted to Reddit. Spent months in that loop. Being a programmer, I thought I'd be clever. Redirected Reddit's domain to nowhere in my DNS file. Worked great until I'd just... open the file and undo it 20 minutes later. So I made it irreversible. Locked the DNS file so it can't be edited unless I boot my Mac in safe mode. And if I do that, there's a script that instantly locks it again. Haven't used Reddit since last year. Problem solved, right? Wrong. I just replaced Reddit with Twitch and YouTube. Started keeping streams running in the background…
Nov 2025 · chromewebstore.google.com · its alternatives →
- 16BM
Hey HN crowd! Two days ago I realized I'm almost unable to read a book or a long article without getting distracted by Twitter/HN/Reddit/Work. The situation is so terrible, I'm even getting afraid of big articles, and my ReadItLater list is getting pretty long (shameful I know) ... and I'm pretty sure most of you are in this situation :) Being used to TL;DRs on long reddit posts, I thought it would be great to have these for everything, so I quickly hacked this website: http://www.too-long-didnt-read.com/ Here is an example of TL;DR: http://www.too-long-didnt-read.com/5tropy I would love to…
2011 · too-long-didnt-read.com · its alternatives →
- 17IA
Maybe you've had this experience too: You build something you're proud of, post it on HN with your low-karma account, and... crickets. Zero votes, zero comments. That's what happened to me last Monday. I posted my coding tool (XaresAICoder - an open-source browser IDE) that I'd built with AI assistance. In my mind it was revolutionary. On HN? Completely ignored. Then I wondered: How many other potentially great projects suffer the same fate? What "hidden gems" are we missing because they come from low-karma accounts? So I built hn-gems (with help from Claude and my own XaresAICoder). It…
2025 · hn-gems.sensem.de · its alternatives →
- 18AP
Hello! I’ve been reading Hacker News for years and have a bad habit of favoriting articles but never actually going back to read them. I finally built hnbuffer to scratch my own itch and help me work through that backlog. I also mainly built this as an excuse to learn/use some of the languages/frameworks/tools since I have another backlog of things I wanted to try too. It syncs your favorites into a queue with a reader mode and swipe gestures. The streak tracking is something I'm still experimenting with. Note: It requires an HN login to scrape the favorites list (credentials…
2013 · hnbuffer.com · its alternatives →
- 19T1
HN has some of the best discussions on the internet, but I don’t love reading 100 comments to find 10 great insights. This site analyzes top HN threads with LLMs and summarizes the key ideas, disagreements, and resources — while preserving links to the original discussion. Useful for revisiting old threads as well. Updated daily, manual-assisted for quality, no spam, fan project only. Would love thoughts from the community. https://hn-discussions.top
Jan 2026 · its alternatives →
- 20AM
TLDR: I built a "quick and dirty " private social network for my friends, posted on Reddit and HN, got some interest so now have built it properly along with my brother. site link: https://intimost.com/login/ demo creds: [email protected] Demo123! Full version: I needed a social network where I can just send updates and nothing else. So I built it, my friends liked and now I have built it "for the world". Everything is private by default. - Text-only updates - No likes. Only views to acknowledge a post - [in development] Comments are private between the poster and…
Oct 2025 · its alternatives →
- 21IA
I built an archiver that tracked every HN item for 27 days (Dec 3-30, 2025) and captured 72k temporal snapshots to see how posts gain and lose attention. Key findings: - Early velocity (points/hour in first 2 hours) predicts final score with ρ=0.82. A simple classifier achieves 98.4% precision for viral prediction. - No Matthew effect: high-scoring posts don't get more upvotes per hour than low-scoring ones (ρ=-0.04). HN's gravity penalty actually works. - Yet extreme inequality persists: Gini=0.89, meaning bottom 80% of posts get <10% of total upvotes. Inequality without cumulative…
Dec 2025 · papers.ssrn.com · its alternatives →
- 22
I've been lurking on HN for years. You know the drill: interesting headline, 200+ comments, you dive in thinking "I'll just skim for 5 minutes"... and an hour later you're 36 chambers deep in a thread about memory allocation patterns in Postgres and you've completely forgotten what the original article was about. I don't just want a "summary" (which usually just shortens the noise). I want the meta-consensus: "What is the actual trade-off being debated? Who is winning the argument? Why does this matter?" So I built HNSignals. Think of it less like a "summarizer" and more like a Chief of…
Jan 2026 · hnsignals.com · its alternatives →
- 23
Hi HN, For years I’ve missed the feeling of an always-on chatroom without the silos and social overhead of Discord. So I built Together: a single-room, no-signup group chat that you join with one click. No channels, no rules (yet), no onboarding flow. Everyone lands in the same place and can start talking in under a second. Why I made it - Forums and blog comments are great but slow; Discord/Slack feel heavy for casual drop-ins if you aren’t already a member of a community. - I wanted the simplest possible space where ~100 people could idle, share shower thoughts, and keep the…
2025 · together.lol · its alternatives →
- 24SD
At the weekend I clicked on a post on HN linking to Maciej Ceglowski's twitter that turned-out to be a scathingly brutal criticism of Bitcoin. The HN post was climbing the front-page, and after I'd read the twitter thread I came back to upvote it. Right now I don't remember whether my upvote registered - my HN page was still open, and the post was still visible to me - but when I returned to the first page, it was mysteriously gone. Only a couple minutes had passed, and I couldn't understand how a controversial Pinboard post had gone from climbing fast, to off the first page so quickly. It…
2021 · its alternatives →
Also compare
- Zsync, a Reddit Alternative with the Goal to Reward Quality Comments alternatives
- This Website Will Self Destruct alternatives
- r/hnblogs, Blogging is not Dead alternatives
- Overlead alternatives
- Reveddit.com: Improving online discourse with transparent moderation alternatives
- WP Offline Fallback alternatives
Ranked by how close each launch is in meaning, then by votes. Prices were read from each product’s own site when checked and can change. Refine with your own description →