I measured the half-life of 41,301 Show HN launches. It's 7 hours

In plain words

This project analyzes 41,301 Show HN posts from the past year, examining comment timing patterns to understand audience engagement lifecycles. Using Hacker News API data, the researcher found that successful launches receive half their total comments within 7.2 hours and 90% within 26 hours, regardless of initial success level. The analysis is fully reproducible through an open-source repository, making methodology transparent and verifiable for other developers studying community dynamics and content visibility.

written from the facts on this page · September 2026

From the sources

I scraped all 41,301 Show HN posts from the last year. Half the comments a launch will ever get arrive inside 7.2 hours, and success doesn

In the maker’s words, at launch

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…

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