Hello @torquewrench1969! I am replying here so as not to mess up your "Viewing" experiment. I bet that 99% of serious authors will say something like this: "I really care how many people seem to take the time to study my work. How much I get paid for doing one specific piece is another issue that may or may not be important". In playing up votes and "payment" and playing down page views, the designers of the reward system made one of their big errors, IMHO.
True!
But by NOT playing up views, they just gave me a filter to help me find bots! :)
Not sure how it'll work out, but it's gotta be resteemed to give me a large enough sample to be statistically representative for programming a bot-hunting-bot.
Cool thing is, I don't have to do the programming!
Hopefully, Once I crunch the data, I'll find enough "tells" to make hunting them easier.
Show a programmer/coder EXACTLY what data you want and why, then the bot hunting can truely begin!
I just need it to spread, providing EVERYONE who likes finding patterns a usable chunk of data to work with.
That's a clever route you are following. Good luck!
I recall reading an @paulag post where she found hundreds of bots! (Hope my memory serves me well here.)