Field notes
Playbooks, teardowns and the occasional argument — everything we have learned helping creators grow across every major platform.
All three answers are correct. Which one applies depends on who is counting, and the gap is why a caption that looks fine gets rejected by the form before the platform sees it.
Everything after the fold is read by people who already decided to read. The first line is the only part that talks to everyone else, and it is usually the part written last.
Two posts is never a result. The confounds - time, day, subject, an audience that has already seen one version - are larger than any caption effect you are looking for.
A crutch phrase is invisible inside one post by definition. You cannot find it by re-reading more carefully - you find it by putting thirty posts next to each other.
Jargon is not bad writing, it is expensive writing. It buys precision from people who share the vocabulary and charges everyone else the cost of looking something up.
Nothing is wrong with the words. There are just fourteen sentences in a row of between twelve and sixteen, and an average is the one statistic that cannot see it.
Every published expansion table gives one percentage per language. The number that decides whether your caption fits is not that one - it is how short the English was to begin with.
The translation is the easy part. What catches people out is that the caption no longer fits, the hook is now below the fold, and the hashtag reaches a different set of people entirely.
Power words are a copywriting convention, not a ranking factor. What is measurable is position: a first line built entirely from function words has spent its one chance on nothing.
The first line, before anything else. Every other placement is a judgement call, and two of them have been ruled against — the hashtag block and anything below the fold.
No platform publishes an emoji limit, so any number quoted at you is invented. Three things about emoji are measurable, and they are what should decide the count.
Almost every disclosure that draws a regulator's attention has perfectly good wording. What it does not have is placement. Here is what to say, and where it has to sit.