On X, posts with a link got 1.42x the views of the same account's usual post.

Posts without a link got 0.87x.

I looked at 466 recent posts from 15 developer-tool brands.

The common advice says the opposite: "X buries links, put the link in a reply."

So I pulled the posts and checked.

What I scraped

I scraped the timelines of 20 accounts: vercel, supabase, github, cursor_ai, AnthropicAI, OpenAI, stripe, Cloudflare, linear, Railway, neondatabase, posthog, figma, nextjs, tailwindcss, Replit, huggingface, Docker, raycast and bunjavascript.

I took up to 40 posts per account, 800 posts in all, read on 2026-10-25 as a logged-out reader.

The Apify run id is gtDJjrmM5uIt9If2z .

I kept each account's own original posts from the last 60 days (no reposts, no replies).

I dropped accounts with fewer than 8 such posts.

That left 15 accounts and 466 posts.

How I compared them

Big accounts get more views on every post, so raw medians would just rank the accounts by size.

So I divided each post by its own…