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.
A zero-width space occupies a position and draws nothing. Inside a hashtag it makes the tag a different string, so the tag looks perfect and reaches nobody.
Zero-width spaces, byte-order marks, non-breaking spaces and substituted quotes travel with copied text. Here is what each one is, where it comes from, and what it breaks.
An emoji is an instruction to draw a picture, and the receiving device decides. Here are the four ways that goes wrong, and which of your emoji are at risk.
Paragraph breaks vanish, hashtags stop matching, emoji arrive as boxes. Four things happen to a caption between your notes app and the feed, and all four are fixable.