Let me confess something a little creepy.
I have a habit of peeking at other people's dev posts.
Not stealing the writing — relax. I run a tiny read-only job that fetches the public pages on dev.to, Zenn, and Qiita and counts only the boring parts: titles, post times, like counts. Who published what, at what hour, and how far it traveled. Then it tallies the lot.
The reason is petty: my own posts weren't landing. The content is already in my hands — so I wanted to know how much the rest, the when and how you publish, actually moves the needle. By the numbers, not by gut.
So I counted across three platforms. And the conditions that make a post fly turned out to be roughly mirror images between Japan (Zenn / Qiita) and the English-speaking world (dev.to). Here's the story.
