How We Verify Every Autopsy

Each page on the Graveyard Atlas makes a specific claim: this idea doesn't survive scrutiny, for this reason. Here is exactly how those claims are checked before publishing.

The mechanism taxonomy

Every autopsy is classified into one of eight blocking mechanisms — the actual structural reason an idea dies, not a vague "too competitive." Free floor, gold-rush graveyard, ToS/legal, credential gate, labor-in-disguise, distribution-unreachable, shelf-occupied, and no-demand. Naming the mechanism is what makes a page useful: it tells you whether the door could ever open, and what would have to happen for it to.

Market-tested vs. predicted

“Market-tested” means a real shipped product or experiment measured the failure directly (a live user count, a dead auction, a documented shutdown). “Predicted” means the verdict is an evidence-based forecast from the receipts below, not a direct measurement. A market-tested verdict is the strongest evidence we can publish — it isn't our opinion, it's what actually happened when someone tried.

Receipts, not assertions

Every factual claim on an autopsy page — a price, a user count, an entrant count, a shutdown date — is backed by a public source URL listed on that page. If a fact couldn't be independently verified, it isn't stated as fact. Where evidence was weak or a claim didn't survive re-checking, the page says so plainly rather than rounding up to a cleaner story.

What this site won't do

We don't publish a verdict to be clever or to mock an idea — the reader is someone about to spend months of their life. Every autopsy ends with what would honestly have to change for the verdict to flip, even when that's a narrow or unlikely condition. And a "no" here is never permanent: markets change, incumbents die, and terms of service get rewritten — a page's verdict reflects the evidence at the time it was checked, not a law of nature.

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