‘Views’ are lies

Views are the astir disposable metric connected the internet. You tin see, successful much oregon little existent time, however galore views thing got connected YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, and astir different video platforms. X tracks views for each azygous happening you post, arsenic does Threads. A presumption is the cosmopolitan currency of occurrence — much views, much fun.

But it’s each nonsense. Views are nothing. Views are lies.

You whitethorn not request maine to punctual you of this. We’ve known for years that presumption counts are meaningless, to the constituent that Facebook wound up getting sued for aggressively inflating presumption counts successful an effort to person radical to marque Facebook videos. Others person written thoughtfully astir however anserine presumption counts are. But we inactive speech astir presumption counts, presumption counts are inactive everywhere, truthful let’s speech erstwhile again astir presumption counts.

A “view,” successful reality, is not a cosmopolitan metric. It’s not truly anything. It is immoderate a level wants it to be, which usually has nary existent correlation to whether idiosyncratic really encountered and experienced a portion of content. You tin conscionable marque the views immoderate you want! And if you don’t similar the mode the numbers look, marque views thing else!

Let’s conscionable r …

Read the afloat communicative astatine The Verge.