Requirement of Eliminating Self Views and View Pumps on Blog Posts

Preface

I happened to have come across an interesting phenomenon on steemit which is not new to the world of blogs and vlogs, which is view counts on a post or a video.

Normally, that is considered as a sign of success specially on those platforms where number of views is directly linked with the success of a post or a video. That is why most video viewing websites have usually placed strict restrictions on self-viewings since one can easily just refresh the page and count themselves as a new viewer.

however, with Steemit, the effect of this phenomenon is the other way round. On Steemit, there are three factors upon which a post is considered either a success or a failure and those three factors are :-

1. Number of views
2. Number of upvotes
3. Total Rewards

I will take first 2 factors into account here.

Number of views and number of upvotes have a major role to play in determining the success of a certain blog post.

For instance, if the views on a post are 300+ yet the upvote count is only 30+, that is considered as a sign that public in general did not like the article and hence chose to ignore it.

Self viewing and View Pumps from Another User on Steemit

First I would like to talk about self views on steemit.

Normally 20 to 30 views on a blog at steemit occur as a direct result of self viewing. Self Viewing can occur due to multiple reasons:-

1. Author wants to revisit the blog to see if there are any errors and they may do that 4 to 5 times during 7 days pending payout period.

2. Author wants to reply to comments that they have received on the blog (Imagine an author revisiting their blog to respond to 60+ comments on different times of the day with one reply per comment per instance, that will make the counter hit 60 more times and can be regarded as self views.

3. Author wants to post an update on the blog and everytime they will open it for editing, it will count as a view.

Example

I revisited one of my posts three times within the span of 2 seconds apart between each visit to prove my hypothesis and indeed, every refresh was counted as a new view. I would like to post the screenshots to further augment my case (Please note that the clock shows the same time as each refresh was done 2 seconds apart).

View pumps on a blog from another user

It is to be noted here that someone can also intentionally refresh one's post a thousand times with in 1 hour to make the view counts hundreds of times more than the upvote received to make others think that post is generally disliked by most audience whereas behind the scenes, that 1000 views audience is in fact just one person.

Why Upvotes / Views Ratio Matter

It has been mentioned earlier that the upvotes / views ratio is generally understood as response of the public towards certain post and the future upvoters may choose to NOT upvote a post on factor that even after a healthy visibility of the post, most people chose to ignore it so may be they should do too.

However, that 'healthy visibility' might have been created either on purpose by someone or by author as a result of self views, which does not depict the correct image of visibility of related article / blog.

Prevention Techniques of Self Viewing or Intentional Views Pumps

Regardless the reason, intentional or unintentional, self-viewing and view pumping by another single user is not a healthy practice and may lead towards hurting a blogger's image. To prevent this phenomenon, following techniques can be implemented :-

1. Views from same IP address may be regarded as a single view on a blog post

The view counter can be authorised to detect and verify the IP address of a viewer before it actually does counts the visitor's view. That way, more than one visit from the same IP address can be restricted and both self viewing and pump viewings from another user can be restricted. I hereby produce the flowchart of IP address verification by counter:

It is understood that a user can change the IP address to again visit the blog and make his / her view count but it will be a bit difficult to do that in comparison to just hitting the refresh button continuously.

2. Steemit Account Storage and Verification by Counter

There may be another way to restrict self views and view pumps by a single user. The view counter can be modified into verifying access of a single steemit account to a certain blog as "Single View". I hereby produce the flow chart of this technique :-

I understand that this concept will be much more difficult to implement and that it may require some serious changes in counter settings. I also understand that storage of visitors' account by view counter on each blog can cause increment in memory size, which may lead to a slower network access.
However, it has a major advantage over IP address verification technique. A steemit account's visit to a certain blog can only be regarded as a "single view", no matter from where that blog post has been accessed from.

This technique will significantly restrict self views and / or view pumps from another user.

Conclusion

It is suggested to respected developers to kindly take into account the above mentioned techniques in order to eliminate self viewings and / or view pumps from another user so that views / upvote ratio and visibility of a blog can be depicted in true letter and spirit.

I rest my case...

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Posted on Utopian.io - Rewarding Open Source Contributors

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