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

jonno.nz

19 points by jonnonz 13 hours ago

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 (https://github.com/jonnonz1/hn-attention-cliff), and every number in the post maps to a named function. Keen to hear where the methodology falls short

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