Show HN: Browse dead and dying startups | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Browse dead and dying startups

deathwatch.io

21 pointscaspii11 comments

Busy companies also don't tweet, or acquired ones, or ones that have found Twitter to be an ineffective way of reaching customers. In'n'Out Burgers is listed as Dead, for example, as is Valve Software. Methinks Twitter may be a poor metric for measuring this.

In'n'Out Burgers is listed as Dead

I found that one particularly amusing. Perhaps instead of "dead" it could be called "companies who woke up to how much of a waste of time and resources a curated Twitter account can be". I'm picturing the Director of Social Media Engagement in a meeting, trying to explain how In 'n Out has sold even a single extra hamburger because of their presence on Twitter.

You are right. But it's a good approximation in most cases

Good god that's a frustrating UI. Am i blind or is there no meaningful way to find a company you're interested in? Ie, a search.

I used the alphabetical list, but scrolling through what seems like thousands of companies is a bit asinine. What am i missing?

edit: This is bothering me more than it should, so i figured i would try to automate scrolling to the bottom of the page so i can try and find the company i wanted. Once opened devtools, i saw it making requests to an API, looks like i was on page 30:

    http://deathwatch.io/json/US-ALL-SORTED_AZ-30.json

So, i just started poking around the pages of that list. With that said... it seems to stop at page 79. Eg:

    http://deathwatch.io/json/US-ALL-SORTED_AZ-79.json

That works... but this:

    http://deathwatch.io/json/US-ALL-SORTED_AZ-80.json

Does not. It looks like page 79 is on the Cs of the A-Z listing.. hmm

I wanted to host the whole thing statically, hence no search. I'm just a mediocre hobby developer, so I can live with it.

Regarding the missing pages, I noticed that too. Will look into it.

Sorry, not trying to be harsh. If we have the ability to manually paginage, that would be enough. As it is, it would take me a long time (30m? no idea, honestly) to get to the bottom request on my trackpad.

I want to use the service, but seeing as i can only view the first dozen pages or so with any sanity, it basically makes it impossible.

If this were beefed up with data from news sources / actual Crunchbase activity, it would be more accurate. SimplyHired, for example, seems to be dead (news sources say it may have died in June) whereas I'm pretty sure OKCupid is alive, but only tweets occasionally (like when a new blog post comes out.)

Still, good start

You made me remember Hi5! It was Facebook before Facebook in my country.

I also recognize a number of these projects, a lot of which are now basically on "auto-run" (not dead, but no new feature since a while)

I wonder where did the list of startups come from? the info activity is being pulled from twitter, but as for the names of the startups?

Names and Twitter handles come from Crunchbase

Amusing to see Berkshire Hathaway is on the unwell list.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com