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Is Show HN dead? No, but it's drowning

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Re: Is Show HN dead? No, but it's drowning

#21

Post by marginalia_nu »

mchaver wrote: post #18
weird-eye-issue wrote: post #5

I did a Show HN a few years ago on another account. It got no upvotes but that website/app has generated over $6m in revenue in that time (over $4.5m profit). Not sure what my point is but thought I'd share

I think HN is a very particular group of people and not representative of the market for a lot of the products we make. We tend to like open-source things, ask lots of technical questions and complain about minute things. Also, Show HNs tend to perform better if they are quick to use (no sign in required, don't need to download, etc.).

It's also a pretty big lottery. Two nearly identical projects can get very different receptions depending on the phase of the moon.

Re: Is Show HN dead? No, but it's drowning

#24

Post by imiric »

This aligns with my experience. It's good to have it properly analyzed.

If this effect is noticeable on an obscure tech forum, one can only imagine the effect on popular source code forges, the internet at large, and ultimately on people. Who/what is using all this new software? What are the motivations of their authors? Is a human even involved in the creation anymore? The ramifications of all this are mind-boggling.

Re: Is Show HN dead? No, but it's drowning

#25

Post by weird-eye-issue »

mchaver wrote: post #18
weird-eye-issue wrote: post #5

I did a Show HN a few years ago on another account. It got no upvotes but that website/app has generated over $6m in revenue in that time (over $4.5m profit). Not sure what my point is but thought I'd share

I think HN is a very particular group of people and not representative of the market for a lot of the products we make. We tend to like open-source things, ask lots of technical questions and complain about minute things. Also, Show HNs tend to perform better if they are quick to use (no sign in required, don't need to download, etc.).

Yes, this was in a marketing niche and I knew it wasn't a good fit

Re: Is Show HN dead? No, but it's drowning

#27

Post by NoboruWataya »

> Show HN of course isn't dead. You could even say it's more alive than ever.

You could argue it's dead in the sense of "dead internet theory". Yes, more projects than ever are being submitted, but they were not created by humans. Maybe they are being submitted by humans, for now.

Re: Is Show HN dead? No, but it's drowning

#29

Post by weird-eye-issue »

jansan wrote: post #22
weird-eye-issue wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Affiliates. They made it blow up overnight with an existing audience

So the affiliates obviously get 25%.

30%. But it brought tons of word of mouth and such after the ball got rolling so the total affiliate commission compared to our revenue lifetime is closer to 10-15%

Re: Is Show HN dead? No, but it's drowning

#30

Post by Shank »

I've long wanted something like Blog HN as a way to post things things that I wrote without feeling guilty of submitting my own site. Things that authors themselves write and post are often a good signal. But this should be completely separate from any new products, etc.

I think that Show HN should be used sparingly. It feels like collective community abuse of it will lead to people filtering them out mentally, if not deliberately. They're very low signal these days.

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