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 launched on December 28, 2025 with 34 votes, #492 of 11,628 launches that month and more than 90% of that year's launches.
In plain words
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 that 93.2% of posts fail to reach 50 points while top performers start at 270 points. The full dataset is available as a downloadable file for users who want to conduct their own analysis.
written from the facts on this page · September 2026
From the sources
A statistical analysis tool that evaluates launch titles against 4M+ historical Hacker News & Product Hunt posts to predict viral potential.
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