Hi HN,<p>Writing this short post with a quick question. How come my product got its fame on HN (to the point of a hug of death) and now, only hours later, I can’t seem to get a single user? I am interested in how the dynamics work and what could have gone wrong. Is HN a lottery, more or less?
I don’t think anyone can explain how exactly social site dynamics work, it’s highly chaotic. There are posts analyzing best time of the day, day of the week, etc. to post Show HN entries, you may find these somewhat useful. So, yes, it is mostly a random variable.<p>Other than that, I’ve noticed that tone and content do matter. For example, your current post has an annoyed, confrontational tone to it, which may reduce incentive to reply. It also feels rushed, eg you mention your product and do not name or link it (I assume it’s ThreadQuilt that you’ve posted a number of times recently).<p>Quick decline of interest is common: you commonly hear about a movie that opens up number one in the box office but immediately drop down next week, similarly with some albums. AFAIK, most sites announced on HN see a drop off of HN traffic after they get picked up; this is inevitable, but usually it should take a few days (or 1-2 weeks for better products). The fact that your traffic dropped very quickly may show that the idea was gimmicky: it sounded good but either was not well executed or did not have the expected value.<p>Looking at ThreadQuilt I’d say you have both factors: it’s a very basic site pulling, it seems mostly from Reddit. The summaries a well formed grammatically but have epsilon value, ie they don’t replace reading the thread in most cases. Rather than the summary a better way would be to display a few top comments, for some measure of “top”.<p>I hope that helps.
You posted it three days ago and got 58 points, that should translate to 6000 visitors [1]. It's a quite succesful post.<p>Today you posted it again. Three times! It's very rare to get traction agini with the same post. The users that read the \newest page probaly remember the oldpost and don't upvote again if the last discussion was too recent. Also posting three times is anoying, and people may be angry and flag your post or just ignore it silently.<p>The FAQ [2] classify it as a repost for "a year or so". It's not a hard rule, but it's definetively more than 3 days. Sometimes you may get a succesful post with a blog post about a new feature that you added to your site of some technical problem that you solved, but it must be an interesting blog post, not just some 1000 empty filling words.<p>[1] using the rule of thumb N*100+50<p>[2] <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html">https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html</a><p>PS: If you want people to compare your old and new site, instead of two post make only one post and make a comment with a link to the other vesrion instead of a different submission. Anyway, my sugestion is not to repost your site for a while.
Maybe because so much has been piled on top of your first post that no one is noticing it any longer? Or perhaps people have moved on to something that they find more interesting or relevant?