Not on HN, but I remember the initial demo of imgur being torn to bits on reddit. And when Joel Spolsky announced his idea that would eventually turn into StackOverflow, it was derided as useless because the work already had enough question/answer sites.
"The only problem with Stack Overflow is that the rate of activity pushes all but the easiest questions off the front page quite rapidly. Most people there just answer the easiest questions and ignore the hard ones."
You notice when uni's go back the questions are often just homework
Dropbox was criticized when it first came up on Show HN. People said that they could create their own and that nobody would adopt installing something.
I released MyPost (https://mypost.io) which allows anyone to create beautiful simple web pages in minutes with just a few clicks. Completely free with no registration required.
I didn't put "SHOW HN" in the title as I was fairly new to Hacker News. It also didn't do much to gain many comments on Hacker News, but as far as gaining attraction from around the world.. it managed to gain a huge amount of attention in Russia and other parts of the world. It probably has so far received over 100,000 visitors in about a year with no advertising on my part. I would love to monetize it eventually, but for now, it was definitely a nice project that helped me learn a lot about PHP and MySQL.
My personal favourite is Mondo (or Monzo as they are now called). Their founder/CEO posted here when they launched and the thread got very little attention. These days they are one of the most respected startups in London and are on the cusp of enormous success - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9638345
The difference in taste between HN and PH was on display in the thread about the AngelList's acquisition of PH. I found it really bizarre. A gathering of people who build stuff just completely deriding something built by a small team for reasons I couldn't make heads or tails of.
Yeah, that's a fairly succinct summary. I suppose I put some effort into having a positive-by-default outlook on stuff others have created. I don't think those descriptions of PH are _bad_ things and even if they were bad, then I would assume that it became bad only by mistake not out of intention.
