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I've been following HN for 10+ years, first as a lurker and then getting into the whole "build something people want" thing. Over the years, I've "launched" quite a few projects here. Some have failed, while others have succeeded far beyond my modest expectations. But in a pre Product Hunt era, launching on HN was the only way to get exposure to your product. Even today, for a number of highly technical projects, HN is the best place to get the word out.
While HN crowd has a reputation of being too cynical at times (the most famous example being the original "Show HN Dropbox"), over time, pre-empting how the HN crowd will potentially react and what kind of criticism a project might attract has actually helped me improve the product before launch!
> I mean one day you got traffic 100K on the website. Good. But just for one day.
My latest project, Typesense, which is an open source instant search engine (https://github.com/typesense/typesense) literally found traction only after posting here on HN. Yes, it was a ~50K single day traffic, but it had a permanent impact on the baseline traffic. So nothing is as useless as it looks :)
Apart from the value I've gotten out of all these Show HNs, there is an incredible amount of value in the comments on HN. In fact, I often just skip the main post and just skim through the comments. Also, unlike certain other forums, snarky/toxic comments are discourage and moderated.
Every so often, posts from Bruce Dawson's blog get posted here - one such post was about using Event Tracing for Windows to diagnose an issue with an NTFS lock being held causing 63 cores to idle while 1 does all the work.
https://randomascii.wordpress.com/2019/10/20/63-cores-blocke...
A few months later, some other people in my team were struggling to diagnose an issue in production where a legacy webapp was struggling to scale up and fully use all 64 cores of the server we needed it to run on. I stepped in to help and remembered that post I'd seen on HN. We used ETW (through Windows Performance Recorder and Windows Performance Analyzer) to profile our app and I looked into the Wait Analysis. Turns out that Entity Framework 6 uses a ReaderWriterLockSlim to guard a cache, and that particular lock performs extremely poorly under heavy contention. Heavy in our case meant that for a single page build of one of this app's "hot path" pages, this lock would be taken a few hundred thousand times. We weren't the first to discover this:
https://github.com/dotnet/ef6/issues/1500
What some other people in my team were struggling with for about two weeks was resolved in a single day thanks to me goofing off and reading HN. (We ultimately used a fork of EF6 that didn't suffer from this issue to solve our problem)