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).