Developer finds his 114-article scoring system never evaluated his own work

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A developer on DEV Community built an automated pipeline that scores trending posts twice daily using reactions and comments to select unique writing topics, publishing 114 articles based on its recommendations. After applying the same scoring formula to his own 30 most recent articles, he found a median of zero reactions and a median of one comment per post. Three articles scored a flat zero despite each having documented justifications for their 'distinct angle.' He concluded the pipeline functions as a novelty filter — checking whether a topic has been covered before — but not as a quality or resonance predictor. The developer acknowledged he had been treating a high topic score on others' posts as a proxy for likely engagement on his own, without ever verifying that assumption.

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