As stated in the question "Does the number of views on an SO question exclude my own views?" the views of the question asker are included in the view count of a question.
I think it would be a good idea to exclude those views. Especially for rarely visited questions this creates a bias in the count. This way the view count would be a stronger indicator for interest in a question.
This feature request is already solved (basically). If you are worried about the view count not accurately displaying people's interest in your question, then Arjan's comment above with Jeff Atwood's answer should should shed some light on that.
"our view counts are very very strict -- more akin to visits as they are unique per IP per 15 minute interval."
If your question is reasonably popular, you'll have nothing to worry about. Unless you're systematically viewing your questions...
If you're like this user who attempted to write a script to sneak in the 10K views for a badge, then you'll have some more issues to factor in ;)
I fully agree with OP & respectfully disagree with @BenBrocka - for questions with limited visibility that are highly important to the poster, the poster may check back on the post daily, refresh for new answers, and see the post count has gone up (@Ason: "Unless you're systematically viewing your questions").
"At least people are reading it, someone's sure to answer soon", they might logically intuit. But they're not aware - because it doesn't follow the commonsense point of the platform - that the amount of times your question has been viewed includes the count of how many times you yourself (the one person in the world who is definitely NOT able to answer it) have read it. I came to slowly suspect this was the behaviour before confirming it by explicitly searching, and am frustrated that I wasted a week thinking that the steady trickle of interest would eventually lead to an answer.
In my opinion this is a bug (& @Scolytus should tag it as such), since the behaviour deviates from what would be expected by common sense, and directly undermines the value of the feature. I was going to raise this issue as a bug tag before finding this post.
Users shouldn't have to implement a custom script. This shouldn't be ignored simply because it becomes irrelevant when enough other people have viewed the page to dilute the effect of self views. Given the rationale for the existing setup is memory saving (avoiding keeping a growing IP list for each question), could the compromise be that it stores a list of only the logged-in user's IP addresses? This would typically be 1, a handful at most, so shouldn't be a resource burden.
It's unclear how frequently this is an issue, since it'll primarily affect:
Users in communities which are less active (common enough)
Users who aren't aware that this is how the feature behaves (conceptually everyone, initially)
Users who don't know how to, or don't care to, pick their way through the labyrinth to find this specific post on this specific board in order to discuss this bug.
