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Growth · alternatives · 2026

24 alternatives to Viral Potential Predictor

Hey HN, We analyzed 4,010,957 Hacker News submissions to find what actually makes posts perform well. Key findings: - 93.2% of posts never hit 50 points - Top 1% starts at 270 points - Certain keywords boost engagement by 1000%+ Built a free tool that scores your launch title and predicts viral potential: [link] The entire 4M post dataset is available as a single 700MB .mv2 file if you want to run your own analysis.

Viral Potential Predictor analyzes nearly 4 million Hacker News submissions to identify patterns in post performance. It offers a free tool that scores titles and predicts how well they might perform, based on findings… Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes.

  1. 1IB

    Hey HN community, I built a tool that helps optimize your post for hitting the first page of Show HN. How it works: I used a Hugging Face dataset of all Hacker News posts from the past 3 years and trained a model that predicts how successful your post might be. There's still a lot of randomness on HN, so nothing is guaranteed, but the tool helps optimize your post for higher odds. A couple of interesting findings: - GitHub repo links work x3 better than regular domains - Open-source tools have a steady virality rate (13.9% - one of the highest) - "I built" outperforms "We built" - Using…

    May 2026 · wannalaunch.com · its alternatives →

  2. 2HN

    Did you want to know topics of the news or popularity of posts? "Hacker News Hack" helps you to find news based on some categories and importance or popularity. It tagged news with 9 categories with a natural language processing technology and supervised learning for categorizing news. It also calculates a speed of number of comments in each posts as popularity based on term, that is 1 hour, 1 day, 1 week, 1 month, or 1 year.

    2014 · newshack.io · its alternatives →

  3. 3

    Write the perfect LinkedIn post with AI

    2022 · taplio.com · its alternatives →

  4. 4

    Accessible end-to-end deep dive of crawling, embedding, projecting, and semantic searching all of Hacker News for my Hackerverse project.

    2024 · blog.wilsonl.in · its alternatives →

  5. 5HN

    I made a little website with a server that collects only HN submissions with > 500 upvotes chronologically. https://hn.moritz.pm/ It's quite simple because I wanted to learn from the project. But I think it's useful, to get a summary of what was important over the last days. The UI is almost identical to the HN frontpage, you can click on the comments to view the thread and on the username to see the profile. The rest of the cards takes you to the submitted URL.

    2024 · hn.moritz.pm · its alternatives →

  6. 6AT

    Hi HN, I spent a few weeks looking at the top HN posts of all time. This included exploration, clustering, creating visualizations, and zooming in on what (to me personally) seems like some of the best discussions on here. Three things in this post: 1- The interesting groups of HN posts 2- The interactive visualizations that you can explore in your browser 3- The data from this exploration -- this includes CSV of the titles as well as the text embeddings of 3,000 Ask HN articles. Blog post about this whole process here: [1] ============ 1- The interesting groups of HN posts From the…

    2022 · its alternatives →

  7. 7

    Hello HN! TLDR; - Quality News is a Hacker News client that provides additional data and insights on submissions, notably, the upvoteRate metric. - We propose that this metric could be used to improve the Hacker News ranking score. - In-depth explanation: https://github.com/social-protocols/news#readme The Hacker News ranking score is directly proportional to upvotes, which is a problem because it creates a feedback loop: higher rank leads to more upvotes leads to higher rank, and so on... → ↗ ↘ Higher Rank More Upvotes ↖ ↙ ← As a consequence, success on HN depends almost…

    2023 · news.social-protocols.org · its alternatives →

  8. 8FH

    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 →

  9. 9

    Hey HN! Just for fun, I built an interactive Hacker News Simulator. You can submit text posts and links, just like the real HN. But on HN Simulator, all of the comments are generated by LLMs + generate instantly. The best way to use it (IMHO) is to submit a text post or a curl-able URL here: https://news.ysimulator.run/submit. You don't need an account to post. When you do that, various prompts will be built from a library of commenter archetypes, moods, and shapes. The AI commenters will actually respond to your text post and/or submitted link. I really wanted it to feel…

    Nov 2025 · news.ysimulator.run · its alternatives →

  10. 10AW

    I submitted a link, when someone clicks on it I get an up-vote for this article. I don't want people to misuse this I just want to bring attention to this problem. This is the link I used that up-votes this: http://news.ycombinator.com/vote?for=3742742&dir=up&...

    2012 · its alternatives →

  11. 11
    Hacker-AI▲201

    A/B test your HackerNews titles with AI before publishing

    2020 · its alternatives →

  12. 12HN

    The use of the em dash (—) now raises suspicions that a text might have been AI-generated. Inspired by a suggestion from dang [1], I created a leaderboard of HN users according to how many of their posts before November 30, 2022—that is, before the release of ChatGPT—contained em dashes. Dang himself comes in number 2—by a very slim margin. Credit to Claude Code for showing me how to search the HN database through Google BigQuery and for writing the HTML for the leaderboard. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45053933

    2025 · gally.net · its alternatives →

  13. 13

    upvotetracker adalah situs berita yang menyajikan laporan terbaru dari berbagai topik dengan analisis yang cepat, jelas, dan mudah diikuti pembaca.

    2021 · upvotetracker.com · its alternatives →

  14. 14AT

    Hi everyone, we developed a tool that can easily tell you the overall sentiment of a message based on a word. For now it’s hacker news only but we think this thing has potential. Whether you’re a startup, solopreneur or product manager, you can track trends with it. We are also planning to add predictive tools and real time analysis. Operationally this tool is a lot cheaper than Sprout Social or other similar solutions on the market. No sign-up required. Just type and see results. I'd love your feedback on the tool's usefulness and any ideas for improvement.

    2024 · classysoftware.io · its alternatives →

  15. 15

    Hi! I’m Julien and I built a recommendation engine for Hacker News. I feel like this website is a gold mine. Every day, I find some very interesting stories about a topic. And sometimes, I want to find other stories covering that same topic but I can’t. Hacker News has years of history of awesome discussion and ressources. Unfortunately, I think HN Algolia isn’t helpful in searching these old threads. As a student, I want to learn a lot from this website. This is why I created HN Recommend. Input a sentence or the URL of an article, and get the most popular and similar posts from Hacker…

    2023 · hn-recommend.julienc.me · its alternatives →

  16. 16
    TL;DR▲199

    I love Hacker News but I rarely have time to read full articles / comments, so I built a simple site to summarize the top posts & comments to make it easier to get a big picture. A few implementation details: - It pulls the top stories from the HN Firebase API (`/v0/topstories`) - Filters stories with >200 points - Uses Claude Sonnet for post + comment summaries - Tries to capture the sentiment of the comments (still working on improving this) - Refreshes both posts + summaries hourly It has already helped me I hope it helps you! Please let me know if you have any feedback --…

    2025 · tl-dr.tv · its alternatives →

  17. 17HA

    Hey there HN! I wanted to share a pet project of mine. I built HackYourNews [1] to scratch a personal itch: Knowing which stories to focus on while browsing aimlessly (though there is a certain joy in that, as well!) HackYourNews uses OpenAI's gpt-3.5-turbo to summarize the destination article as well as the comments section. Summarization of the article is always cached, while summaries of the comments are regenerated if the comments count is >10% (or >10 comments) different. While I styled the homepage to welcome HNers, my preferred view is the Mobile view, accessed from the navbar. This…

    2023 · hackyournews.com · its alternatives →

  18. 18

    Hi yall! I've been using hacker news for a while but one of the things I started wanting recently was the ability to have alerts for any stories I post. The thing that pushed me over the edge was Hackclub's shipwrecked https://shipwrecked.hackclub.com/ (hackathon in the boston bay for anyone that can make 4 projects over the summer and get at least one of them to go viral). One of the options for "going viral" was to get to the front page of hacker news but I was constantly scared that I would miss it getting on there lol so I whipped up a quick slackbot to send alerts to a…

    2025 · hn.dunkirk.sh · its alternatives →

  19. 19

    Test your HN title against a neural network. Contribute to victorqribeiro/hntitlenator development by creating an account on GitHub.

    2019 · github.com · its alternatives →

  20. 20UT

    Hello HN! About 1.5 years ago we published an idea on how to improve the Hacker News ranking algorithm (https://felx.me/2021/08/29/improving-the-hacker-news-ranking...). The main idea was to counteract the rank-upvotes feedback loop by using attention as negative feedback. We received very valuable input from the HN community (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28391659), and have since come up with something that we think could be a real contribution: the upvoteRate metric. upvoteRate is an estimate of how much more or less likely users are to…

    2023 · its alternatives →

  21. 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&#x2F;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. 22IB

    It took me six months to analyze 562 subreddits. I systematically parsed titles, post bodies, and user interactions to identify statistically significant patterns and evaluate if it was possible to create a model that could predict the likelihood of a post going viral based on specific features. The key findings were unexpected: while the title of a post has a direct correlation with engagement, there is another highly influential factor I initially overlooked, timing. The optimal time to post on Reddit, in terms of engagement, can significantly vary based on geographic distribution. The…

    2025 · its alternatives →

  23. 23

    It ranks the top 100 posts of any Instagram public user

    2019 · its alternatives →

  24. 24HN

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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 →