Hacker News Atlas research

The vanished vocabulary of Hacker News

19 once-prominent Hacker News title terms and their collapse, 2007–2025: peak year, peak share, and what remains.

Data through 2026-07-26

Words leave the front page. Web 2.0 once appeared in 1.81% of a year’s story titles — by 2025 it kept 0.002%. Across the 19 published terms, the median fall from peak is 99.6%. This page measures words in titles, not the worth of any technology; some vocabulary simply gets absorbed by successors.

Terms published19

Median fall from peak−99.6%

Largest peakWeb 2.0 · 1.81%

Window2007–2025

The old web says goodbye

Peaks from the first stretch of the archive.

Web 2.0−99.9%

MySpace−99.8%

Silverlight−99.7%

Second Life−98%

Netbook−99.6%

jQuery−97.7%

BlackBerry−97.7%

Windows Phone−99.5%

Foursquare−99.2%

Each line is one term’s share of story titles, scaled to its own peak. The dot marks the peak year; the number is the fall from peak to 2025. Hover or focus a line for exact values.

The startup springtime fades

Peaks from the deal-a-day, check-in, app-platform years.

Groupon−99.7%

CoffeeScript−99.3%

SOPA−99.9%

Google Reader−99.8%

Google Glass−99.7%

Firefox OS−99.7%

Bitcoin−87.6%

Each line is one term’s share of story titles, scaled to its own peak. The dot marks the peak year; the number is the fall from peak to 2025. Hover or focus a line for exact values.

The hype cycles complete

Peaks that rose and fell within living memory.

Clubhouse−99.8%

NFT−97.2%

Metaverse−93.9%

Each line is one term’s share of story titles, scaled to its own peak. The dot marks the peak year; the number is the fall from peak to 2025. Hover or focus a line for exact values.

The exact record

Vanished vocabulary, sorted by fall from peak
Term	Peak year	Peak share	Share in 2025	Fall
SOPA	2012	0.38%	0.000%	−99.9%
Web 2.0	2007	1.81%	0.002%	−99.9%
Google Reader	2013	0.14%	0.000%	−99.8%
MySpace	2007	0.77%	0.002%	−99.8%
Clubhouse	2021	0.16%	0.000%	−99.8%
Groupon	2011	0.30%	0.001%	−99.7%
Silverlight	2007	0.14%	0.001%	−99.7%
Google Glass	2013	0.31%	0.001%	−99.7%
Firefox OS	2013	0.09%	0.000%	−99.7%
Netbook	2009	0.22%	0.001%	−99.6%
Windows Phone	2010	0.18%	0.001%	−99.5%
CoffeeScript	2011	0.11%	0.001%	−99.3%
Foursquare	2010	0.19%	0.002%	−99.2%
Second Life	2007	0.17%	0.003%	−98%
jQuery	2009	0.38%	0.009%	−97.7%
BlackBerry	2009	0.20%	0.005%	−97.7%
NFT	2021	0.46%	0.013%	−97.2%
Metaverse	2022	0.21%	0.013%	−93.9%
Bitcoin	2014	1.14%	0.142%	−87.6%

Method and honesty

Each value is the share of that year's retained story titles matching the term, counted over the tokenized title index (word matches, not substrings). Complete years only; the current value is the last complete year.

Published terms once reached at least 0.08% of a year's titles, have lost at least 85% of their peak share, and peaked no later than 2023. The list is curated and human-reviewed; a term's fall measures the word in titles, not the technology's worth. Reviewed but not published: PhoneGap.

Read the methodology or open the attention map for the fixed topic taxonomy these terms sit outside.

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