Sorry to butt in here!
I want to, but can't consider page views as a reliable metric for analysis as the count is upped each time you refresh the page yourself.
If this view could be shown as unique, that would cut down (but not eliminate - multiple browsers, cache/IP refresh/change) the risk of gaming. It's quite easy to find an app/write a program that refreshes your page constantly and so I would be weary of using this as an accurate sign of popularity.
Cheers!
Oh for real? I hadn't noticed that a refresh would increase the view count. And to be honest I never considered that someone might build an app to constantly refresh their page/views, but why wouldn't someone try that in order to create a buzz around their work. Thanks for bringing this up, I guess that means view statistics should be viewed with a grain of salt.
View counters like that are extremely easy to manipulate and so would be the ones counting unique views. Anybody who might be getting flack for posting a lot of low quality content for big rewards might have an incentive to bloat that metric, so they might appear to be adding "surprisingly high" value to the blockchain. I think it's extremely likely to have posts like that on here already as building the required app is really easy even for people with very low levels of technical skills.
So the conclusion that he's bringing a lot of views to the steemit blockchain remains questionable.
Yeah, give a blog a refresh (or 3) and see what happens.
I think also that there is no central store on the Blockchain of viewer count across the web front end applications (eSteem, busy.org, etc) and so the numbers become even more skewed when you factor this in.
I suspect it's already happening in some cases....
cheers!