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.