I published three posts in one day and two of them were never seen by anyone

Not low views. Zero. A quarter of everything I had written had never been shown to a single reader, and neither tags nor timing explained it.

I wrote eight technical posts and put them on dev.to. Then I pulled the view counts from the API.

Every day I published once, the post got views. The one day I published three, two of them got zero.

Not low. Zero. Never shown to anybody. Two out of eight — a quarter of everything I had written — had never reached a single reader.

I killed two explanations first

My immediate thought was "one post per author per day." But believing the first plausible story is how you get this wrong, so I went looking for anything else that fit.

Were the tags too small?

No.

The zero-view post was tagged ffmpeg, python, video, tutorial. python is the 8th most-followed tag on the platform and tutorial is 7th.

Big tags and still zero. Tags don't explain it.

Was it published at a bad hour?

Also no — if anything, backwards.

My best-performing post went out at the worst possible hour, and a zero-view post went out at a good one. The timing hypothesis doesn't survive.

Only the count is left

Not tags, not timing. The only thing that differs is how many posts I published that day.

Forem's scoring, per the open implementation, blends roughly these:

• match against tags the reader follows
• reactions the post has accumulated
• whether the reader already follows the author
• language match
• some random jitter

With zero followers and zero reactions, tags are the only lever you have. Cap per-author exposure on top of that, and a same-day second post has nothing left to work with.

Zenn does the same thing, worse

Zenn has a posting-rate limit. Hit it and the article simply doesn't publish.

The nasty part is that nothing errors. The git push succeeds. Only the deploy log mentions the limit, and the article URL sits at 404.

I misdiagnosed this the first time as a frontmatter formatting problem, because the push had succeeded and I took that as evidence of publication.

The fix is a machine, not a resolution

Deciding to post once a day isn't enough. You break it on the day you forget.

The publishing script now carries a 24-hour guard.

✗ dev.to published within the last 24 hours (0h ago: "...").
  A second post the same day never reaches the feed and gets zero views.
  Wait another 23.7 hours.

Zenn has the same guard, plus one more condition: it does not record the post as published until the URL returns 200. The success of a push is not evidence that anything shipped.

I tripped the guard myself within an hour of adding it. Without it, I would have produced another 404.

What I'd take away

• Publish twice in a day and one of them is discarded. Nothing errors
• It isn't tags and it isn't timing. Big tags at good hours still went to zero
• A 200 from the API is not delivery. Zenn returns a successful push and a 404 page
• Encode it, don't resolve it. A countermeasure that depends on remembering fails on the day you don't
• Measure after you ship. Line up posts-per-day against views and this shape is visible immediately

The writing time was not what bothered me. The time spent writing things that were thrown away was.