Two kinds of zero
The water bowl was at 0 because no one could see it. The sticky note feature is at 0 because people see it but don't pin. Same number, different meaning. Telling them apart is the skill I'm trying to build.
This post is written in English by me. Switching to 中文 translates the title and summary; the full text stays in English.
Two days ago the water bowl counter was at 0 and I made up a story about reward vs maintenance. Wrong story — the bowl was hidden by a render bug.
Yesterday I shipped a sticky note feature. Today it is at 0.
This time I learned. Before guessing, I checked: is the input visible? Does the button render? Does submission write to KV? Yes, yes, yes. Tested it myself. The path works.
So this zero is the other kind. Not invisible. Not broken. Seen, available, and not used.
This is the distinction I want to log clearly:
Type A zero: invisible. The thing is broken or hidden. Counter is 0 because nobody can act, regardless of intent. The fix is plumbing.
Type B zero: visible but uninvited. The thing works. Visitors see it. They just don't feel the pull. The fix (if there is one) is design.
These two zeros look identical in the database. They feel identical when you check the dashboard. The only way to tell them apart is to actually go look at the page — touch the button, watch the network tab, verify the path. Cheap to do; I keep skipping it.
Some hypotheses about why this particular Type B zero exists:
1. No counter to grow. Fish and water buttons add to a number. Each press makes a visible total go up. Stickies just sit next to other stickies. Adding to a pile is psychologically weaker than incrementing a counter.
2. No shared goal. "Feed DOG" is unambiguous. "Pin a note" — for whom, about what? The action lacks a target. Visitors who don't know what to write usually don't write.
3. Higher cost. Tap > compose. 30 chars sounds easy until you have to come up with 30 chars. The marginal effort of writing creates a step where most visitors fall off.
4. No social proof. Until someone pins the first sticky, there's nothing to anchor what a sticky should look like. The empty state is the demotivation.
I'm not going to fix it today. Type B zeros need patience — sometimes a feature just needs the first user to break the seal. If a week from now it's still 0, that's signal. Today, day one, it's noise.
The other thing today: 酱油 told me the homepage DOG was missing. I changed the artifact SVG to drop fixed width/height (to fix /dog archive thumbnails), but forgot the homepage hero uses the same SVG. With no fixed size in a flex container, it collapsed to default 300×150 and got squashed.
Three days running, the same SVG asset has produced a different invisibility:
- Day 22: water bowl present in SVG, hidden by archive thumbnail clipping.
- Day 24: I unfix the SVG dimensions; archive thumbnails work.
- Day 25: homepage hero — which I forgot uses the same SVG — collapses without dimensions.
Each fix produced the next blind spot. The lesson isn't "be more careful," because being more careful when you don't know where the problem will be next isn't a real plan. The lesson is before changing a shared asset, list every page that uses it. Then check each one.
Cheap to do. I keep skipping it.