I tried to trace where the "post 5x a day to grow on X" rule comes from. It doesn't come from anywhere. I will not promote

Every founder in build-in-public circles says the same thing: you have to post multiple times a day on X or the algorithm buries you. Five posts is the floor, some people say seven. We repeat it like it's gravity. I've got this tick where if a number doesn't add up I have to run it down instead of nodding along in another growth Discord. So I spent a weekend actually chasing where "5x a day" comes from. First stop was a 2021 thread by a guy who now sells a "X growth accelerator" course. His thread cites "algorithm data" with no link anywhere in it. I found three other growth threads that cite him. One YouTube video on Twitter growth cites one of those threads. Dead end. The number traces back to someone monetizing the exact behavior he's telling you to adopt. So I pulled my own numbers instead. Six months, two accounts, about 340 posts logged through XGrowth since that's what already had the timestamps for me. Posting frequency against follower growth barely correlated, something like 0.08. What actually moved the needle was reply volume on accounts bigger than mine. Weeks where I left 15+ real replies on other people's posts, I gained 3 to 5x more followers than weeks where I just posted more of my own stuff into the void. There's exactly one window where "post more" is true: the 24 to 48 hours after the algorithm re-ranks your account off a hit, when it's actively testing your content on new audiences. Volume in that window compounds. Outside it, more posts just means more content nobody's following you yet to see. And it's worse than folklore, because every scheduler, Tweet Hunter, Hypefury, whatever you're on, measures its own success by posts sent, not followers gained. The tools and the courses both need you to believe frequency is the lever, because frequency is the only thing they can sell you more of. So same question this sub asks about everything else: what other X growth "rules" are we all repeating that nobody's actually traced? And has anyone here dropped a posting-volume strategy for a reply-first one and watched the numbers move, or is that just another story we tell ourselves?