Alternatives
Products that do what Forum where posts slowly disappear unless interacted with does
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…
- 1
- 2RH
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
- 3
- 4SD
Hey fellow HN-ers, I'd like to ask HN about my latest startup: SocialFolders. We take a Dropbox-like approach to managing your content on your social networks by mirroring all the content you have on these networks in folders on your computer. Moving this content around, between folders or between services, is mirrored in the all-mighty "cloud" (ugh, I hate this word). We'd love to know what you think. We think our approach solves the problem of managing content at scale. We put together a quick 2'30 screencast to show HN how it works: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4s2TFsVezZQ If you want…
2012
- 5IM
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
- 6DE
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
- 7TU
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
- 8UT
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
- 9IB
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
- 10HN
I put this together since I find myself switching away from the terminal to see if anything new popped up in HN. There might be similar ones out there, didn't bother looking. It was a quick experiment, which might end up with a few more features.
2011 · github.com
- 11HR
Hey guys, I just flicked the switch on http://hnrecap.com and thought I would make a tiny announcement! The site was created for a simple reason: There is a big rotation of articles on the front page of Hacker News every day, and unless you are on here 24/7, you are bound to miss some great content and discussions. I was tired of this and the rss feed doesn't cut it for me since it doesn't preserve ranking information over time. On HN Recap, rankings are somewhat preserved: Every 2 minutes, I request the HN front page, update articles and attribute points in the following simple fashion: #1…
2010
- 12RO
I was lucky enough to have my site trending on Friday (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25872922). It’s an icon site that lists open source icons. I wanted to share some stats on the results after 3 days. Worth noting was that I submitted it on a Friday morning (at which point I went for a walk and a coffee; eek). - 24,997 page views. I (embarrassingly) didn’t have GA set up when I first submitted it, so this is probably missing a few hundred page views - 21 “feedback” emails (half of which were spam). I assume such a high percentage of these were spam because my Feedback…
2021
- 13BM
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
- 14IA
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
- 15SH
This morning I've submitted our project to HN. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4099054 Got pretty helpful feedback. But that wasn't the only thing. 478 people requested invite out of 755. 63% conversion rate. Almost 9K unique visitor visited our website. At some point in the morning I was seeing 400+ active users on the website. Unbelievable. 35 people registered without telling them how to register. ( You cannot register directly, there is only a login form - but they figured out a way :) http://imgur.com/Kbf9J 6K people visited directly from Hacker News, 1K from Twitter ( I guess…
2012
- 16T1
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
- 17AM
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
- 18IA
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
- 19WT
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
- 20TA
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…
Oct 2025 · together.lol
- 21QU
So I just did my semi-annual "log in to Twitter to see if it's any good yet", and found that in my absence I had followed a few thousand new spam accounts. Sweet. That explains why they emailed me and forced me to change my password last year. Being Awesome, Twitter doesn't have any way to simply toss out all your followers and start from scratch. And none of the spammy apps claiming to do so actually will (even seemingly after charging you money to try). So instead, I just pulled open the Dev console and did this:…
2014
- 22SD
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
- 23AW
I've tracked the top 3000 subscribed (and some subreddits that I visit frequently) subreddit's active user over time, so you know when to post to get the most feedback! I come from a nodejs background, and this is the first time coding with Go, so the structures might not be standard. But feel free to give me any feedbacks!
2024 · redditdb.info
- 24HL
I am re posting this because when I had made this post the first time there were a few problem with the site that I had to fix and had not anticipated. I got some nice feedback though, so I thought I'd just make one more post because most of the problems have been fixed. HN Live is an alternative interface to Hacker News which provides all of the data on Hacker News in real time. This allows for the real time viewing of what goes into and leaves the trending page as well as the `newest` section. It is just a personal project, and I would like some feedback if you have any. Thanks Site:…
2015
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