I certainly can imagine local improvements people would get from having more information here, the question is whether you can implement the function without causing all the longterm distortions Habryka described.
An option is giving the feature to people with high karma so you have to demonstrate some acculturation before being handed Goodhart’s Key, but honestly I’m not sure there are people, high karma or otherwise, who I really trust to remain impervious to the subtle pressure to write more clickbaity things, over time.
If it’s a non-public view count, I don’t see it becoming a goodheart metric. If something is too clickbait or trash, it would get downvotes. If it doesn’t get downvotes, maybe there’s good reasons.
Maybe it would be worth internally having:
page view count
upvote count
downvote count
vote total (also possibly up and down vote total)
comment count
some sort of relative metric that can compare this article to the other articles nearby.
I certainly can imagine local improvements people would get from having more information here, the question is whether you can implement the function without causing all the longterm distortions Habryka described.
An option is giving the feature to people with high karma so you have to demonstrate some acculturation before being handed Goodhart’s Key, but honestly I’m not sure there are people, high karma or otherwise, who I really trust to remain impervious to the subtle pressure to write more clickbaity things, over time.
There are two features. “author sees view count” and “public sees view count”. Which one are you talking about?
Author sees viewcount
If it’s a non-public view count, I don’t see it becoming a goodheart metric. If something is too clickbait or trash, it would get downvotes. If it doesn’t get downvotes, maybe there’s good reasons.
Maybe it would be worth internally having:
page view count
upvote count
downvote count
vote total (also possibly up and down vote total)
comment count
some sort of relative metric that can compare this article to the other articles nearby.