[wjg]

Seconded. Additionally, I'd love to see a distribution of comments/upvotes by date of submission (such data I think could be gleaned from HN search). My eyeballs tell me posts submitted within the first 2 or 3 days of Apply HN got much more traffic/discussion. Certainly it is possible that those first posts warranted such discussion and subsequent posts did not. Or maybe I'm completely wrong in my observation, which is why I'd like to see such data.

Also, after ApplyHN became randomized (around midway thru the experiment) it seemed like discussion dramatically fell again, but it was definitely tough to tell since refreshing showed new applications every time.

Fun experiment though and I'm excited to see what types of projects the community picks.

[abhi3]

I second this. After the first 2-3 days there was a sharp drop in engagement in general, though there were some applications that did break through.

When ranked by upvotes, of the top 5 applications, 2 were posted after the first 3 days.(https://medium.com/@ApplyHN/top-5-applyhn-submissions-ranked...)

And 6 applications posted in the first 3 days reach top 10 and only 4 from the remaining 18 days.

[tshannon]

Yeah, what was the criteria for making it to the main Apply listing? Was it number of votes? Comments? Our application never showed up there: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11467813

[wjg]

Yep, mine never made it to the front of ApplyHN either. It seemed like unless it got at least one or two immediate upvotes, it disappeared into the abyss, thus making it even less likely to get traffic.