In 2026, Ask HN posts wait over twice as long for their first comment. Show HN posts got faster.

My last two posts looked at Show HN's odds: the share of posts that reach 10 points nearly halved, and the repos under launches are newer than ever. But points and repo age are both Show HN stories. The obvious next question: what about Ask HN — and what about speed? Not how much attention a post gets, but how long it sits alone before the first human reacts.

So we measured time-to-first-comment (TTFC): from the moment a story is posted to its earliest comment, for every Ask HN and Show HN post in matched one-week windows across three seasons (January, April, October), 2025 vs 2026. That's a 3×2×2 design — six windows, every post in each, from the public HN Algolia API.

The result in one table (median hours to first comment, comment-bearing posts):

window	Show HN	Ask HN	Show vs Ask
2025-01	16.0h	11.2h	no difference (p=0.27)
2025-04	11.0h	6.8h	no difference (p=0.87)
2025-10	4.5h	6.4h	no difference (p=0.41)
2026-01	3.8h	8.7h	Ask slower (p=0.007)
2026-04	6.7h	15.0h	Ask slower (p=0.010)
2026-10	4.3h	11.8h	Ask slower (p<0.001)

Three things to notice.

In 2025 the two lanes were statistically indistinguishable — three times out of three. Whatever changed, it changed between then and now.

In 2026 the gap opened in every window. Ask HN posts now wait 2.2–2.7× longer than Show HN posts for the same first signal of attention. And Show HN's lane got faster year-over-year: pooled median 9.6h → 5.1h (p=0.002) — under the harshest submission competition in its history, the posts that do get traction get noticed quicker.

The change is speed, not existence. The share of posts that never get a comment at all stayed stable on both sites across all six windows (Ask ~27–37%, Show ~58–67%). Show HN is fast-for-the-few: most posts still get nothing, but the ones that get a comment get it quickly.

One revision we own. Mid-study, at two seasons, Ask HN's slowdown looked like a year-over-year trend (p=0.045). The third season broke that: January flipped direction, and the pooled Ask trend is not significant (p=0.29). What survives is the 2026 cross-section gap — replicated 3 of 3. We published the two-season version first and corrected it here; this is what sampling multiple seasons before claiming a trend is for.

Why it matters: composed with the odds-thinning result, the gap says whatever is moving HN is not confined to Show HN's points race. "More submissions" can't explain the Ask HN half — Ask HN's submission volume didn't double the way Show HN's did.

Full data and method: the 70,894-post Show HN dataset and 28,091 Ask HN posts, MIT-licensed, with a checker script that recomputes every number above from the raw samples and fails loudly on any mismatch.