Your Show HN dies in 7 hours

At 1pm UTC on a Friday last June, an airline pilot posted a Show HN: interactive graphs and globes built from years of his own flight logs. It went huge. 1,539 points, the third biggest Show HN of the entire year. By dinner he had 123 comments. On day three the thread got 3 comments. In week two it got zero. The third best launch out of more than forty thousand, and the conversation was over before the weekend ended. I wanted to know whether that shape is the exception or the rule, so I scraped every Show HN from the last 12 months using the Algolia HN API: 41,301 posts, plus the full comment tree of every launch that got at least ten comments. About 100,000 comment timestamps. The scraper, the analysis, and the data are all in one repo if you want to check my working. The pilot's flatline is the rule. The only unusual thing about his launch is that it had a peak. The median launch gets two points I went in to measure decay speed. The distribution of outcomes stopped me before I got…