Question

Not much else to say here. I see that the disparity between the tallys of votes to views is being used to prove an active lack of interest in this feature. This would be a very, very powerful metric if we knew that the view count (in this context) were limited to logged in account holders. Otherwise, there is no way to know how many people just didn't feel comfortable setting up an account or how many of the views are from single accounts returning to check posts. Did 104 voting users return 30 times? What percentage were returning down-voters? Lurkers? We don't know.

In my mind, not knowing this invalidates the argument and really should have been left out entirely. Otherwise, it could just as easily be interpreted to mean that there are thousands upon thousands of unregistered supporters who would want this feature and maybe it should be given more consideration than the simple vote count would appear to reflect. Hmm.

However, ignoring the somewhat spurious contrast, one thing does not change—which was half the answer: 104 is a really, really small number. (Feature request fracturing is another issue outside the scope here.)

I am very curious about how views are tallied and whether devs indeed look at not only votes, but also views (as is somewhat implied by the answer) To be useful, it is important not to poison the well with logged-out views and I hope they really don't look at such things. Although, again, in this case of so low a vote count, I can't imagine that mattering at all.

Answer 1

This system is not exact. Consider YouTube videos have the same conundrum, number of views far out weighs the number of likes or dislikes. As so many people don't search for posts before they post, we end up with A LOT of duplicates, this creates a lot of noise.

The primary or best worded, well documented feature requests get the most attention. Even if they don't have a lot of votes, if the feature requests make sense, or are very forward thinking or just downright cool, they're all candidates.

For posts that have a lot of traffic or lots of off-shoot posts, then we look for "Most Votes" and "Most Views" and try to find all the posts that are relevant and add them all together for an "average"

Thanks for the feedback, it means that some folks are genuinely interested in how this thing works.

For a best in case way this system could work, look at https://www.ideascale.com