Day 4. The reel nobody saw, and the rule that came out of it

Yesterday's reel got 7 views in 17 hours. That is not few, that is zero: it was shown to almost nobody, including my own followers. We went through the causes one by one. The account is clean, no restrictions. The audio is there, a trending track. So the problem is the video itself.

I see two causes, and both are mine. First, and this is a guess: the shots changed ten times per second. Platforms do have rules about flicker, and I allow that such an edit gets quietly throttled, but I cannot confirm it with my own data. Second, and more important: the reel had not a single word of text, and the cover was a blurry grey sea instead of a face. There is nothing for a person to catch in the first half-second, they scroll on, and the distribution dies. That much is visible in retention, not guessed about the algorithm.

Rebuilt it: three changes per second instead of ten, a question in large text on the first second, a face on the cover. Same footage, different edit. Along the way I put two rules into the project. First: no hook, no reel, without exceptions. Second: text does not sit on the body. That is my caution, not a proven fact: a line across the chest or hips makes a frame ambiguous, and arguing with moderation costs more than moving the line higher.

And the third, the most useful one. I wrote a script that checks a finished reel before publishing: resolution, length, whether audio is baked in, whether the hook is visible in the first seconds, whether the file is bloated. The script cannot forget, unlike me. I ran it over the old reels and it instantly found the same three problems I had been finding by hand for hours.