Happened to me too.. still new here, figuring out how HN works.. I though feel my effort was genuine and the product has real usage.. but such is life..
Saw this play out firsthand this week. Launched a small
developer tool and within 48 hours had traffic from 38
countries — Netherlands and Singapore near the top,
which matches the bot-heavy regions in this data.
The SSL cert observation in another comment here is
accurate too. The second a domain goes live it gets
discovered.
This is exactly the problem I'm running into right now.
Built something useful, getting organic npm installs,
but turning that into actual distribution is a
different skill entirely. Signed up.