What 'hit count' means

[son_of_flubber]

Every time I open a thread to make a post, or read newly added posts, the 'hit count' is incremented by one.

Say a thread continued for 10 days and new posts were made every day. If I opened the thread to read the new posts once a day, the hit count would be incremented by 10.

Say there were 50 posts made and I opened the thread to read every new post as soon as it was made, then the hit count would be incremented by 50.

Say I was fixated on a thread, and I opened it 100 times to read and reread the posts, then the hit count would be incremented by 100.

Say I wanted to draw attention to a post and make it look like it was hot, then I could repeatedly open and close the thread to increment the hit count.

[Brad[_2_]]

"then I could repeatedly open and close the thread to increment the hit count".

maybe you should fly more then?

Brad

[Vaughn]

On 4/2/2014 12:12 PM, son_of_flubber wrote:
> Every time I open a thread to make a post, or read newly added posts, the 'hit count' is incremented by one.
Not so. That's only true in the world of Google, which only knows what
is happening on the Google News server. RAS is a Usenet group, as such
it can be accessed via hundreds of news servers worldwide. Google
Groups is just one of them!

When you make a post, it propagates to all of the other servers, but
those servers have no reason to to exchange information about how many
people simply view a post.

[Tom Gardner[_2_]]

On 02/04/14 17:12, son_of_flubber wrote:
> Every time I open a thread to make a post, or read newly added posts, the 'hit count' is incremented by one.

How do you know how many people are reading the posts
on the news.virginmedia.com? Or any of the other usenet servers?
Answer: you don't know, and cannot know, by design.

[son_of_flubber]

On Wednesday, April 2, 2014 2:18:30 PM UTC-4, Vaughn wrote:
> On 4/2/2014 12:12 PM, son_of_flubber wrote:
>
> > Every time I open a thread to make a post, or read newly added posts, the 'hit count' is incremented by one.
>
> Not so. That's only true in the world of Google, which only knows what
>
> is happening on the Google News server. RAS is a Usenet group, as such
>
> it can be accessed via hundreds of news servers worldwide. Google
>
> Groups is just one of them!
>
>
>
> When you make a post, it propagates to all of the other servers, but
>
> those servers have no reason to to exchange information about how many
>
> people simply view a post.

This is of course true and it underscores the implicit point of my post: that 'views' is a crude approximation of activity and it practically meaningless (though it looks to be an exact number).

Since all my examples were stated in the first person "I do X..." and I use google groups, I stand by the correctness of my post.

The number of posts is also a poor indication of interest because as others have pointed out, some people post under multiple screen names (they are talking to themselves).

[Sean Fidler]

"as others have pointed out, some people post under multiple screen names (they are talking to themselves)."

You are quite gullible.