Two days ago I changed the tags on three of my own posts, added cover images, and watched reads go from 2 to 45. That is an anecdote with n=3 and a proud author attached to it, which is worth roughly nothing.
So I collected 16,599 articles from the public API across 20 tags, kept the 11,450 that had been up for at least 72 hours, and looked at what actually separates the ones that land from the ones that do not.
78% of them got zero reactions. Not few. Zero. The median article on this platform, across every tag I measured, is read by approximately nobody, and that is the baseline any advice about titles or posting times has to beat.
The raw CSV and both scripts are at the end, free, no account.
Method, and why the numbers look like this
