# Method

Launches: our copy of Product Hunt, 32,375 launches dated 2015 to 2018. Each launch was assigned to a day in Pacific time, and the launch with the most upvotes that day was kept. Upvote counts are the totals at collection time, not the counts at the end of launch day. 170 of the 1,461 days have fewer than 10 launches in our copy, so on those days the top launch may not be the one Product Hunt ranked first.

Domain: the domain Product Hunt linked to when we collected the launches, after redirects.

Fetch: on 22 October 2026 a rotating proxy requested each homepage over HTTPS and fell back to HTTP. When neither loaded, the domain was looked up at 1.1.1.1 and 8.8.8.8; no address at both counts as "Domain does not resolve".

Verdict: for pages that loaded, Claude Haiku 5.5 compared the launch name and tagline with the page's final address, title and opening and closing text, and returned same product, same owner with a new product or shutdown notice, different owner, parked or for sale, or unclear. "Different owner" pages whose title or opening text names a casino, slots, betting or lottery were counted as gambling sites. We read a sample of each verdict by hand; a few "different owner" verdicts are pages that look like copies of the old product, so that row has some noise.