Konrad Borowski wrote:
Continuing the discussion from What should selecting each topic list field do?:
First of all, this is a thread about views column, not view count in thread itself.
Does this column provide useful information? Or could it be simply removed? First of all, there is no doubt that views column shows threads that become popular, like discussion of JavaScript vs CoffeeScript. But, is that information useful to the user?
Views column is part of forum tradition. It's practically default on many forum systems, with few exceptions where admin manually removed view column from the layout (like Pixelmator Support or CSS Tricks).
But let's take a look at it. What does view count say? To be honest, I don't know. It's just an arbitrary number for me that I always ignored. On any forum system, including Discourse. Perhaps it means something else to you (tell me if it does). Why you would care how many people viewed this particular topic before viewing it yourself? There is no doubt that lurkers are important part of Internet culture, but information about their activity isn't useful for a forum user.
There is only one advantage of view column I can think of - it can be used by thread owner to determine how much activity the topic brings. However, Discourse offers a perfectly fine solution - view counter inside the thread itself.
And if we push it, there is another advantage. It could be used by staff members to determine popular threads, for analytics purposes (like the most common referrers). On Stack Exchange, there is Tools page which shows various statistics, one of them shows most active questions (yes, I know the "questions" on this image aren't question-like, but this is https://codegolf.stackexchange.com/). This could be added to admin dashboard page, if it could be useful.
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However, the view column has its disadvantages. It's yet another column in the view, confusing the users with the numbers. Without it, the main page would become cleaner. Wouldn't it be great to make thread list less confusing? In fact, I believe this is the goal, with the removal of way more useful likes column (view counter is just a rather arbitrary counter, when likes actually show if users like this thread).
One less column, and there is just one column with just numbers (the activity column doesn't quite count, as it has units) - the post count itself.Continuing the discussion from What should selecting each topic list field do?:
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