Field notes
Playbooks, teardowns and the occasional argument — everything we have learned helping creators grow across every major platform.
YouTube's chapter rules are a parser, not guidance. Break one of the four and you get no chapters at all — not the valid ones, none of them — with no error anywhere on the page.
TikTok publishes two documents. One says what gets removed; the other says what is allowed to stay and will not be recommended, and the second one is longer.
Instagram publishes two separate rulebooks. One decides whether a post stays up; the other decides whether anyone who does not follow you ever sees it, and it never sends a notification.
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.
Most hashtag mistakes cost you one tag. Three of them cost you every tag on the post, and none of the three announce themselves.
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.
The picture rendered fine when you pasted it and is a broken icon now. The expiry was in the URL the whole time — here is how to read it.
The same link renders two different cards. Facebook gives a title 88 characters on desktop and about 65 on a phone — and the phone is where most of the taps are.
A shortened link tells you nothing about its destination. Here is how to expand a short URL safely, read the redirect chain, and spot the hop that breaks tracking.
Facebook caches what it read the first time. Here is why a fixed page still shows the old image, and the ways to force a re-scrape.
Rich Pins fail for a short list of reasons, nearly all of them markup on your own page. Here is the order to check them in.
A link preview not showing is almost always one of six things. Here they are in order of likelihood, each with the check that confirms it.