Option to Disable View Counts

[Chris027]

I’d love an option to disable public view counts for articles and even forum topics. 
 

We’ve become accustomed to seeing this because it has been around forever, but I think it’s detrimental to a community. Encouraging everyone to participate can be really tough for those whose topics or blog posts don’t get many views. People get discouraged easily. 
 

Plus, view counts play into the whole “more followers is the goal” ideology, rather than good content and community are the goal. 

[Matt]

I actually agree. I'm not sure everyone would though. But I think a lot of metrics we have scattered around just add clutter and do not add value in determining whether the topic should be read or not.

[Miss_B]

1 hour ago, Chris027 said:

Encouraging everyone to participate can be really tough for those whose topics or blog posts don’t get many views.

Maybe they don't get many views for a reason. Like not being interesting for example. 

 

[Chris027]

50 minutes ago, Miss_B said:

Maybe they don't get many views for a reason. Like not being interesting for example. 

 

Nobody is interesting to everyone. If a topic is interesting to one person or someone finds an answer found nowhere else, that’s fantastic. 
 

Number of views is indicative of one thing, how many views it got. Absolutely nothing more. 

[Matt]

42 minutes ago, Chris027 said:

Nobody is interesting to everyone. If a topic is interesting to one person or someone finds an answer found nowhere else, that’s fantastic. 
 

Number of views is indicative of one thing, how many views it got. Absolutely nothing more. 

It's a useful metric for those monitoring performance of the community but agree that I never look at it and decide to open a topic or not based on that info.

[Miss_B]

44 minutes ago, Chris027 said:

Number of views is indicative of one thing, how many views it got. Absolutely nothing more. 

Really? You are saying it as that is the absoulte truth, when in fact it is just your opinion. 

 

[Adriano Faria]

1 minute ago, Miss_B said:

Really? You are saying it as that is the absoulte truth, when in fact it is just your opinion.

There are tons of browser extensions to "reload" the page a thousand times in one day and this is actually used very often. I can make any content you own the most viewed of all time. Does that mean that your content is valuable somehow? Not at all. It means it will be the most viewed and that's all. Most viewed is different the most valuable.

[Charles]

I would agree a view count is totally irrelevant. Trending over X period of time is way more useful.

But I don't think we can remove view counts as some people get very obsessed with such things 🙂 

[Miss_B]

6 minutes ago, Adriano Faria said:

There are tons of browser extensions to "reload" the page a thousand times in one day and this is actually used very often. I can make any content you own the most viewed of all time. Does that mean that your content is valuable somehow? Not at all. It means it will be the most viewed and that's all. Most viewed is different the most valuable.

I think that you misunderstood my post that you quoted. Where did I say that the more a content is viewed the more valuable is? I was talking about stating an opinon as a fact. 

[Chris027]

21 minutes ago, Charles said:

I would agree a view count is totally irrelevant. Trending over X period of time is way more useful.

But I don't think we can remove view counts as some people get very obsessed with such things 🙂 

Giving community owners the option to remove them would be wonderful though. 

[Joel R]

On 8/24/2023 at 4:06 AM, Chris027 said:

I’d love an option to disable public view counts for articles and even forum topics. 
 

We’ve become accustomed to seeing this because it has been around forever, but I think it’s detrimental to a community. Encouraging everyone to participate can be really tough for those whose topics or blog posts don’t get many views. People get discouraged easily. 
 

Plus, view counts play into the whole “more followers is the goal” ideology, rather than good content and community are the goal. 

At a fundamental level, I wholeheartedly agree. This was web 1.0 thinking, and it's been proven that you can highly manipulate hits and views.  

I definitely think it would be better, especially for long form blogs and articles and indepth topics, that we think about whether or not the content solves a question, or fulfils a need, or brings value.  To put it another way, what's the delivery of value? 

On the other hand, there is actual value to hits.  There's a growing trend among professional community management circles to view lurkers as learners.  They do read, and they do obtain value.  How we measure the extent of learning or value is hard though.  That's when you need to start measuring passive signals such as time spent on content. 

[Chris027]

14 minutes ago, Joel R said:

On the other hand, there is actual value to hits.  There's a growing trend among professional community management circles to view lurkers as learners.  They do read, and they do obtain value.  How we measure the extent of learning or value is hard though.  That's when you need to start measuring passive signals such as time spent on content. 

It should be up to community managers to decide who sees the value in these numbers. I can’t think of a single reason this information should be broadcast to the world on all communities. 

[Chris027]

I should also add that analytics and measurements aren’t for everyone. Just because we can measure everything doesn’t mean it’s helpful in reaching goals. 
 

I write about what interests me and the community writes about what interests it. If we went by stats, we’d all be talking about other stuff trying to boost numbers but simultaneously lowering our enjoyment. 
 

The ways in which we offer content are very similar. We do podcasts because they are fun and a different way to provide information. If we were to go by statistics, we probably would’ve stopped doing pods after 5 episodes. Now, the pods bringing new members to the community even with what I’m guessing is low numbers of listeners.
 

I don’t pay attention to stats. They lead to homogenized content for those with the goal of improving stats. 

[Askancy]

3 hours ago, Chris027 said:

It should be up to community managers to decide who sees the value in these numbers. I can’t think of a single reason this information should be broadcast to the world on all communities. 

I completely agree with you. I think it would be nice to have in IPB v5 more freedom for customization in this kind of thing.

The number of views of a piece of content (in public) may be useful in supportive discussions, but not in a community talking about frogs or TV series, I think it is more important the engagement value that discussion creates, example how "hot" appears when it is very active. 

As in my suggestion below, why would visitors and users care how many people clicked on that link?

Maybe it would be nice to create an "appreciation" system to the topic, other than reactions, something like Steam did. Create a Gamification system, it would help entice a community to be more active and perhaps indicate there the number of "Rewards" given within that topic, which is different from badges, since here users assign them to each other, giving each other points and awards that they have counted in their "inventory," so there is no spam of randomly assigned rewards.

In that case we have a true value in the list of topics: That discussion has had posts with lots of acknowledgements from the community inside, so it has good content inside.

Edited August 25, 2023 by Askancy

[Alex Duffy]