When should you publish a dev post? I counted, and JP vs EN are mirror images

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. First, my most important disclaimer This post is full of numbers, so let me put up a guardrail before any of them. This is correlation, not causation . A result like "weekend posts don't do well" could mean the weekend itself is bad — or it could mean people who post on weekends are just dashing something off on the side. The data can't separate those. Please read it that way. Also, I only keep aggregate numbers I computed myself . I don't store or reuse anyone's article body (read-only GET, count the features, throw the page away). I peek, but only at the overall shape . Nobody gets singled out here. With that out of the way — four findings I enjoyed. 1. The best hour to publish is just your readers' time zone This one came out cleanest. On Qiita , posts published in the morning win (+32pt in the GOOD group). Midday is +14pt. Evening is -32pt, late night -14pt. Zenn likes midday too (+27pt). Late night is -15pt. dev.to is the exact opposite. Late night Japan time scores +7pt — Japanese evening is actually weak. The trick is obvious once you see it. dev.to's readers are English-speaking, mostly US. Late night in Japan is the US working day. Zenn and Qiita readers are in Japan, so the Japanese morni