Hey Brian! How are you doing? I hope life's treating you well :-)
You're totally right, in the current the numbers didn't look very well. Yet, since I'm on steemit it's never been in a different way. Before bid bots dominating the market, there were circles who blindly voted for themselves. So for the large majority of the high payouts the ratio views/upvotes actually never did look very beneficial.
However, for regular users who didn't participate much in these actions, the view counter is a great tool to measure one's success both inside and outside steemit.
I like what @stellabelle said about how it trended outside of Steemit but not inside. Very interesting.
Absolutely. Also: how could we measure that 'trend outside steemit' now without having any idea of how many times an article had actually been opened?
I mean life goes on without view counters, but I really believe they're a smart feature - both for users and Steemit Inc's marketing/PR team (I guess they have one).
I personally think they should bring the view counter back as well because once we start seeing bigger traffic then it would be a good gauge to see. I wonder if people will continue to try the heavy bid bot pushes because everyone who have I have seen rely on it heavily wasn't really coming out ahead. It was only the people who already had a lot of support and then maybe pushed it a little further that are able to benefit from it some.
Absolutely! Actually we already had peaks of bigger traffic and it was great to have the view counter in order to track it. Professionally implemented it can be smart marketing for the whole network.
Here's my take on the bid bot hype :-)
Burning your SBD for trending positions is as if you did the following in real life: You create a new soft drink nobody knows and then buy yourself one single TV spot in the prime time every three days. So you temporarily get maximum attention for an unknown product. How many people who watched your spot would remember your drink the next time they're in the grocery's shop? :-)
This type of promotion won't bring you sustainable growth, unless your brand had been already big before. So I fully agree on what you said: in the long run it only helps those who already had a name on steemit. Nobody will remember that one guy who was once on the trending page 2 weeks ago.
It reminds me of a rat race. The only ones who seriously profit are the vote sellers.