When I logged on a few minutes ago, the following appeared at the bottom of the main page of the forum, declaring the number of "registered users" who were logged-in at the time...Iwannaplato wrote: ↑Thu Mar 28, 2024 7:06 amI have no idea. I doubt 50,000 people visited one of Iambs threads in one day and it seems like he is beginning to doubt his stats, kudos for that.seeds wrote: ↑Thu Mar 28, 2024 1:04 amMy guess is (and it's only a guess) that it has something to do with whenever you search for something on, for example, Google,...Iwannaplato wrote: ↑Wed Mar 27, 2024 10:23 pm Yes, it makes no sense that it's bots. It must be people. Whitefish, Montana has a population just under 50,000 and I hear they're sensitive about nihilism. A Stooge couldn't be right about this one.
(who has a registered bot on this site)
...at the top of the Google page, it states something like the following,...
"About 3,292,000 results (0.38 seconds)"
...which, to me, suggest that Google's search engine instantly probes pretty much the entire Internet (including our posts) for whatever keywords you may have loaded into the query box.
And as such, it counts (or tallies up) as a view of the thread.
So, for example, if thousands of people across the planet ask Google a question about, for example, "nihilism," or "God," or something else we might often discuss here on the forums,...
...Google simply finds the keyword in our posts and counts it as one of those 3,292,000 results achieved in 0.38 seconds, which, again, registers as a view on a thread.
Again, that's just a guess.
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I doubt most people here pop in and look at his threads (or anyone's threads). That even 500 people who do not post here would decide, Hey, let me go take a look at the latest posts in that philosophy forum seems incredibly unlikely.
We're entering the AI era - I hope it doesn't end us - and those things are scouring the internet for all sorts of reasons. You account seems reasonable to me, a layperson, clunking along on intuition.
Registered users: Ahrefs [Bot], Amazon [Bot], Baidu [Spider], Bing [Bot], Google [Bot], seeds [knucklehead], Semrush [Bot]
Now it might be nice (for our egos) to imagine that there are thousands of visitors coming here and gaining great wisdom from our silly conversations.
However, it seems obvious that those multiple mindless and dispassionate bots (acting on behalf of extremely busy search engines) are no doubt the real reason for most of the high view counts on various threads.
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