Publishing your own numbers
Traffic, engagement, growth — the instinct is that visible numbers signal a real operation.
Four separate readers named the same missing thing, in four different formats, and not one of them asked for metrics. All four wanted the same thing: material the operator had not written.
Self-reported numbers are also the one class of claim a reader cannot check — so on a page whose credibility rests on everything else being checkable, they are the weakest item you could add. They lower the average.
The same finding rules out the tempting inverse: generating discussion of your own project for systems to pick up later. What those four readers identified was independent material. Commissioned discussion is not independent — it is you, at one remove, manufacturing a signal about your own reputation.