Best time to post is the hour and weekday a post goes out, chosen to catch the largest share of an audience while they are active.
It gets treated as trivia. It is closer to a distribution setting.
Why timing carries weight at all
Almost every feed decides reach the same way: it shows a post to a small group first, watches what happens in the first minutes, and uses that to decide whether to show it to more people. Early velocity is the input.
Timing changes who is awake to be in that first group. The same post at 3am and at 9am gets two different early samples, and therefore two different distributions — with identical content.
This also explains why the answer never transfers between platforms, which is the part most advice skips:
- Hacker News ranks by votes against time decay, with a narrow window to reach the front page. Post into a quiet hour and there is nobody to vote; post into the busiest hour and you compete with everything else launching then.
- Reddit is not one audience but thousands. A subreddit of European sysadmins and one of American gamers have opposite peaks, and neither matches a site-wide chart.
- A newsletter has no ranking layer at all. Timing there is about inbox position, which is a different mechanism wearing the same phrase.
What goes wrong
The charts are averages over everyone. "Tuesday at 10am" is computed across every industry, timezone and audience on a platform. Averaging is precisely what destroys the signal: your audience is a slice, and the average describes nobody in particular.
Timezone gets read as local. Most published charts are in US Eastern without saying so. Following one from another continent optimizes for an audience you do not have.
Timing is tuned before the post is worth reading. A well-timed weak post gets a slightly larger sample of people who ignore it. The order matters: the post has to earn attention first.
One good result becomes a rule. A post did well on a Thursday, so Thursday becomes the answer. One observation with no baseline is not a pattern — it is a coincidence you have decided to trust.
The honest limit
The only version of this question that has a real answer is your audience on that platform, measured over enough weeks to separate a pattern from a good day.
That means the generic answer and the useful answer are different objects. A chart is a starting hypothesis — reasonable to test, never evidence. The useful answer is something you collect, and most people never start collecting, which is why the same generic charts keep circulating unchallenged.
If you post in a specific community, the smallest honest step is to record when your own posts went out and what they did. Four weeks of that beats every published chart about your platform.