I am curious about the number of views that I received on one of my posts.
Generally my posts are ignored, and since they are on math and science I think that the reading public has made an insightful decision. The number of views on most of my posts ends up at around 250 to 1000 (and that might be generous).
However, one of my posts entitled “The Nature of Mathematics” has over 28,000 views.
Does anyone have an educated (or not) guess as to why this is possible?
Our posts can be seen on Google. But unlike a number of my other posts this particular post is not easy to find.
I sometimes wonder that too, as at any one time there are usually only 5-10 [if I am being generous] members on-line ~ though that could be because i’m in England and maybe the majority of posters are in america.
So lets take it to extremes;
is someone or a group of people clicking on the refresh button on a page to get numbers up?
Is a multiplier of some kind being used?
Are there hundreds of watchers who look at threads but don’t post?
Is there one or more people with alzheimer’s?
I know there are some members with multiple ‘presences’ too [accounts], I do, but that’s because I changed my username once and couldn’t get on at another time so created a new one ~ and can use all the accounts.
Looks like a given group of people are trying to make the site look popular .
Either that or we are hopeless conspiracy theorists.
Personally I would prefer it if ilp was more of a cave-like place of hermatage with a select few dedicated thinkers, like a secret society or gentlemans club. Generally I think most forums that were popular when broadband came about, have died down quite a bit, one would have to talk an awful amount of shite to have a busy site forever.
I have thought about some of these reasons myself.
The first idea, when I test it, doesn’t seem to increase the views. I realize that there is a possibility that the owner might make more money by increasing the views, but I don’t think he is that kind of person.
I do think that there are many more people that look at the posts than actually respond to them. However the ratios are way out of proportion for my post on “The Nature of Mathematics”
There is the possibility that someone could Google search a topic and click through to an ILP post. This actually increases the count. I have tested it against my post on the Twin Paradox by googling “Twin Paradox Valid”, clicking through and verifying that the count increases.
My guess is that Views are not being driven by people. I think that the views are actually being driven by robots like Bing bots and Google bots.
That still does not explain the order of magnitude greater number of views on this particular post.
This is going to sound paranoiac, but I think that Twiffy’s reply, which referenced various fields of advanced mathematics (not the simplistic stuff that I generally use on this site) may have triggered a rigorous NSA search.
It kind of reminds me of the secret police that attended Evariste Galois’s lectures on advanced Group Theory on the streets of Paris.
Cool thought anyway.
Ed
P.S.
Twiffy’s response was actually quite outstanding.
For Background logic I simply used Faust’s Post on the matter. In fact Faust was my imagined audience.
Basically I was trying to discuss the relationships among Mathematics, the empirical world and logic.
Twiffy ended up being the star of the show, though I did like showing how Mathematics forced some empirical objects to behave according to mathematical dictates.
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