In June I promised my app a virality score. What shipped is a "do not publish" gate.

On June 27 I posted here about a virality-estimator feature I'd seen on Higgsfield and announced I was building the same thing for PostSider, my social publishing tool.

Three days later, the first version of the feature existed. It is not what I promised, and I think that's the interesting part.

What I actually built — a Post Checker:

• You paste a draft, it returns a score from 0–100.

• But not one number: four dimensions — hook, clarity, CTA, platform fit — plus a list of specific positives and negatives.

• It knows which platform the post targets. An X post and a LinkedIn post get judged differently, because a great one is usually a bad version of the other.

• It knows if the post has media, and it can carry your brand context.

• A caption rewrite with a tone setting rides along.

Why it drifted from "virality": a single "92/100 virality" number is a black box. I couldn't defend it, and users can't act on it. But "your hook is buried in the third sentence" is actionable. Also, platform fit kept beating raw virality in everything I tested — the highest-scoring draft is the one that should never have been published on that platform.

Practical detail I'm unreasonably proud of: it runs on DeepSeek or Gemini or OpenAI with your own key, so a check costs a fraction of a cent. Cheap enough that the tool isn't a ceremony you save for big posts — it's the gate every draft walks through. Which fits the lesson from my last post here: the hard part of publishing isn't connecting platforms, it's knowing when not to publish. The checker is that lesson productized: it's a "do not publish this yet" gate with receipts, not a crystal ball.

The honest bit: I announced the glamorous version, and the version that survived contact with my own drafts is the boring one that stops me from embarrassing myself. I've learned to trust the boring version.

Do you score your drafts before publishing? And what would you rather have — a virality number, or a list of what's wrong with the post?