We're working on a new stat to help convey the reach of your posts here

Question

We've got a new statistic on the shiny new Profile Page Prototype. It's not perfect yet. And we did a pretty crap job of explaining what it's all about! Let's talk.

What you do here isn't just about solving one person's problem.

A while back, a user contacted us about his friend's account. His friend had been the top user on one of our sites, and active on a couple of others, and had died tragically and unexpectedly. We pointed him toward our guidance for these situations, but we wanted to give the family some perspective on how much their loved one had given here. It struck us that, unlike someone who donates their time in more traditional way (like tutoring), his family probably had no idea what a positive impact the user was having by helping so many people looking for answers.

I was easily able to pull up that he'd answered over 400 questions in just two years, and that the majority of his answers were deemed to be the most useful one. I could try to explain that he'd earned almost twenty thousand rep in that time. And I could tell them that what that meant was that he'd gotten roughly two thousand "up-votes." The problem was that all those things failed to convey what felt important:

A huge number of people who needed help very likely got it, thanks to this user. Digging in further, I discovered that his answers were viewed more than 590,000 times, with the vast majority of those views from people googling for help. That's the impact he made with his time here.

And the same is true for a good many of you reading this: the answers you've written and the questions you've shared have gone on to benefit hundreds, if not thousands of people who found themselves facing similar problems. This is a fundamental part of why Stack Exchange exists - and yet, nothing in the system recognizes this or communicates the multiplicative impact that individuals like you make here.

You gotta get this to get us.

Why should we care if people understand just how important the idea of reusable content is here? For existing users, it can provide some rough perspective on how big an impact your time donated here really has. One thing that drew me in long before I worked here was the idea that my effort here would help more people than it ever could buried in some forum. Now, it's fine if you personally find it just as fulfilling to help one person as it is to help a thousand. Or perhaps your motivation is the challenge in solving an especially hard problem... That's awesome too.

But whether or not the number of people who benefit from a post speaks to you personally, it's valuable for everyone to understand that the engine is designed to make content as reusable as possible, because it informs so much of how our system works...

See, once you realize that it's not just about the one asker, or the four voters, but rather the fifteen thousand searchers with the same problem... Well, suddenly, a whole ton of things that seem prickly and self-important, like editing out "Thanks in advance!" aren't about being "a bunch of power-happy pedants," they're about helping all the people who will ever have that problem to find the best answers. And find 'em instant-like.

How it currently works (and why).

Our initial idea was to capture "Approximate Views of your Helpful Posts". The concept was to give you some sense of how many people saw your work, and had a decent chance of having found it useful. It was not intended to be a replacement for reputation, or to grant any additional privileges within the system (as rep does). It's also not being shown anywhere but the individual's profile (unlike, say, badges). It's also not about measuring effort - we're working on some other ways to better display all the indispensable things folks do to improve the site, and will share them for feedback asap. This was to show the reach your effort had.

The initial methodology idea was just to sum up the total views on all your posts. But we ran into two key issues on answers:

• We didn't really want it to include answers that no one in the community had deemed useful.
• Plus, we can't really even count the views on answers, nor can we count just the views on a question page that came in after a given answer was posted.

So, we realized we had to start by defining some key goals and constraints:

• Will be an estimate, but will generally be a solid approximation in most cases that minimizes meaningful anomalies
• Can be applied to existing posts with data we have (meaning we don't need the post-answer viewcount)
• Should limit answers counted to those that someone in the community found helpful
• Should minimize cases where an answer that adds little (and probably isn't seen by anyone) adds large numbers to the count
• When still in doubt, errs on the side of including views - we'd rather slightly over-appreciate volunteers then under-appreciate 'em

Ultimately we reduced our criteria to:

Views of pages where your helpful posts had some decent probability of being seen.

That doesn't mean we know the visitor scrolled to your post, or that your answer helped them - we simply don't track that. But we should be able to estimate the likelihood of a given question or answer been seen as useful by viewers without enabling the 25th answer on an insanely popular post to get a lucky up-vote and credit all the views to the new author.

That's how we got to the current method, which counts views on the following:

• Questions
  • Non-deleted only
• Answers - Views of the parent question for answers that are:
  • Non-deleted AND
  • Score > 0 AND
  • Not self-answers AND
  • Also meeting one or more of the following criteria:
    • In the top 3 answers OR
    • Is the Accepted Answer OR
    • Score at least 5 OR
    • Has at least 20% of the total vote count

(Note on closed questions: we originally were excluding closed questions, too, but it seemed to cause more harm than good: the ones that never should have been here almost all get closed before attracting many views, so including them very rarely matters. But the ones that are closed with a ton of views almost all were permissible back in the day, so having the score plummet when the rules evolve seemed more harm than the alternative, since the impact is so small there.)

This query is a very close approximation of what's live in the prototype. (It has some minor tweaks to make it play nicely with the public data.)

How can we make it better?

We need your help. Let's use this new number to help convey the underlying concept behind most of what makes us seem so crazy to new users, and to remind the rest of us why we (hopefully) think our time is better donated here than on any of the many other places we could be sharing what we know online. But let's do it right. That's where you come in.

Whatever we change, we're going to add a tooltip that clearly conveys that the number is a rough estimate, and also explains how it's calculated (or links to that methodology).

A lot of you really liked the idea of this number, but it elicited two specific types of helpful feedback:

1. The methodology definitely needs to be clearer, and might be improvable
2. Calling it "Bunnies and Puppies Saved by Hugs" "People Helped" is, at a minimum, a little distracting, and at worst, makes us "Filthy, evil liars." Okay, no one quite said that. But almost.

So, we want your input.

Big Question #1: Do you have any suggested tweaks to improve the calculation method?

Again, what we're going for is something that will generally approximate: "Views of pages where your helpful posts had some decent probability of being seen."

Remember that:

• This isn't pure/perfect/science/a-number-that-actually-does-anything.
• It is an estimate.
• It's okay that it can't separate views that came before your answer, so long as it's very unusual that an answer posted way after the question on a popular question will count.
• It's okay if it can get weird occasionally, as long as those cases are fairly rare, or will tend to occur when the number won't change that much anyway.

We think the current calc does a solid job at this, and most of the feedback so far was more about the name not matching the method (vs. the method being off,) but I bet you can help us make this estimate at least a bit more accurate.

Big Question #2: What's a better name?

We're aiming at something that:

• Conveys the real-world, human difference you're making - "Page Views" doesn't do this well. "People helped" clearly evokes that concept, but the name...
• Shouldn't include too many iffy assumptions about how people feel - If it suggests we know a lot more than seems possible, it clearly distracts from the goal. ("4,052 Babies Rescued From Killer Bees - All Thanks to YOU!")

The goal is to find a name that helps convey that the number is a ballpark representation of the people who had decent odds of getting some real use out of the effort you put in here.

Let us know what you think on the questions, and we can get to work improving this thing.

Answer 1

The phrase "people helped" doesn't concisely convey what you described above because it appears without context. If you change the order of the stats, it may become a bit less ambiguous. Try switching the order to: "60 questions, 195 answers, 207k people helped." That's a bit clearer.

But this is about "reach". You should say their contributions have reached 207,000 people.

If you add a bit more context to the stats (below), it will also be a bit easier to understand. The presentation should look something like this:

I really like that last section. It drives home the ideas that these posts are reaching people outside the membership of this site.

If the example above is too wordy (or if you prefer the "helped {x} people" motif), I have a few other versions I was playing with. Maybe you can mix and match:

These posts have helped

~207,000

people searching this site

Or something that works when viewed in the context of the screencap above:

Has helped

~207,000

people through this site.

Hopefully between them you have something that better conveys the sentiment you are driving towards.

Answer 2

Name: Impact or Reach.

On the algorithm, I'd like to see some use of specific-post links. When people follow a link to this specific answer, it feels like that should mean something even if it happens to be answer #4 and wouldn't count otherwise. It doesn't make sense to just add the view count from those links (it's usually a very small number), but can we find some way to factor it in? Maybe one of these as an additional option in the "one or more of these criteria" list:

• Has had at least some threshold (25, per Announcer?) visits to this specific post (may be expensive to compute)

• Has had an Announcer badge awarded for it (to anybody) (easy to check but may set the bar too high)

Answer 3

The folks at Academia SE already know the name (although the concept is different there):

(drumroll)

Impact factor

The formula should IMHO be modified in a very simple way: take a decimal logarithm and multiply by 10 (the familiar deciBel paradigm).

Why this log-transform? To make people forget about maximizing/tracking this number, and to let it improve visually only after an order of magnitude improvement in impact.

NOTE:

The hidden variable SE devs are trying to measure is severely underidentified - I see no mathematical/statistical possibility of deducing an answer's impact from question views. Even with JS "reading time" statistics, which may be a bit too intrusive to my liking, the error margin is just too wide.

---

_{As I have said before there's little value from making the number discussed a direct competitor to reputation. Here's another take on the profile redesign.}

Answer 4

Metric concerns:

Use stricter validation for late answers on posts with more than 100,000 views. Perhaps if it is a late answer on a post with more than 100,000 views, then it needs to have multiple criteria (such as more than 20% and top 3?5?).

Basically stricter metrics for late answers on high view posts to reduce gaming this number.

Naming suggestions:

• Audience Reached
• Helpful Post Views
• Notable Post Views

Answer 5

I realize this might be undesirable in terms of screen space or visual aesthetic, but I would seriously consider using verbiage instead of a number:

• Hundreds of people reached
• Thousands of people reached
• Tens of thousands of people reached
• Hundreds of thousands of people reached
• Millions of people reached

And further, if the reach is less than "hundreds", don't bother showing it; if it's more than "millions", still just say "millions". (The number of tiers and the level of the top tier are subject to tweaking, but it should be a small, fixed number of very coarse tiers.)

I'm proposing this because it balances a number of themes already expressed in various answers and comments:

1. The thing we're trying to measure is necessarily imprecise (I would argue extremely so), with a lot of guessing and fudging.
2. We want a number that relates to some easily understandable units (so not something like the Richter scale or Dow Jones Industrial Average). This is at least in part to satisfy the use case of being able to tell loved ones that their friend positively affected such-and-such number of people.
3. We would like people not to obsess over this measure or try to game it.

I like the previously offered suggestion of using a logarithmic scale; my proposal just takes it a bit further (and explicitly removes the option of transforming it into some kind of unitless "factor").

Answer 6

Why not go for something based on a well known SE meme?

Unicorns healed: 4024

This has the benefit of a pretty absurd name which immediately suggests that this metric should not be taken too seriously. It also doesn't make any unbased assumptions about "people helped". It's a fun name that would ensure that nobody gets too worked up about what it represents while still conveying the relevant information.

Answer 7

As I posted before this thread was started (undeleted by now):

How about a simple "post views" with as little black magic as possible? The term uses words that are well established and understood. "posts" is universally used as umbrella term for questions and answers. (Let's keep ignoring comments for simplicity.) And "views" also has very little potential to be misunderstood. It corresponds to the term "viewed" we see for any question. And we already have "profile views".

Since you cannot accurately measure views for answers, there has to be some black magic. You could take total views and multiply it by a factor 0 < x <= 1. Doesn't have to be all-or-nothing. Could still be a cheap calculation.

Much of what you have now would go into that factor. But with the neutral term "post views" we could strip assumptions about whether a view actually might have helped the viewer. It's hard enough to pin down the number of "views", especially for answers, but even for questions (think deep links).
Still: less speculation. In this spirit, a single answer to a question with negative votes could still just count fully - adjusted for the point in time it was posted.

To account for the point in time when an answer was posted, we could figure out the typical waveform for total post views over time with statistical methods and then pick a simple formula to best approximate.

Or we could go out on a limb and just save the number of views at the time of posting to remove one source of error. Could be another int column PriorViewCount (like the existing ViewCount) in the table Posts. The great majority of posts only has up to three answers. You could then get mostly accurate numbers for those. For the rest, you'd still apply a formula for the approximate share of views.

Disregard deleted posts (even though there were views before they got deleted).

If this thing is popular enough and you have a spot to spare you could supply two numbers: "total post views" (according to the above) and "estimated helpful" (the number after applying more black magic).

P.S.: When I wrote "but it's really a lie", that wasn't meant to imply you were "filthy, evil liars". Your effort to make the profile more useful is well received and appreciated! But people are typically more than happy to believe flattering news. Not few would start boasting about the "millions" they supposedly have helped, which would quickly become ridiculous. There is no need for that. The impact of this site is great without exaggeration.

Answer 8

The problem is with "people"

The word, not actual people. As of today, the stat now reads

X people reached

I think there is still a problem, and it is not nor was not about the word helped or reached.

1 person can be 100 people

The reason "people" is problematic, especially when qualified with "reached" or even "helped" is that it implies that the people are unique. The metric should improve by 1 for each person I help.

This is not the case though, if one person has viewed 100 of my posts, suddenly they count as 100 people. Take into account that this can happen with more than 1 user, and the "people" that have been reached or helped is clearly exaggerated.

What or who was really helped?

The reality is that one person has had 100 quandaries, dilemmas, problems, or inquiries which led to them viewing 100 of my posts. I think that this is what should be related in the title, and that it still relates to people. People are the source of these quandaries, dilemmas, problems, or inquiries and it will still be a rough indication of how many people have been helped while not exaggerating the exact number of people.

• 100 quandaries [ helped | assisted ]
• 100 dilemmas [ helped | assisted ]
• 100 inquiries [ helped | assisted ]
• 100 [ helpeful | positive ]? collaborations

I believe one of these may be a more accurate description, while still conveying the helped terminology.

Definitions

Quandary: a state of perplexity or uncertainty over what to do in a difficult situation.
Dilemma: a situation in which a difficult choice has to be made between two or more alternatives, especially equally undesirable ones.
Inquiry: an act of asking for information.
Collaboration: work jointly on an activity, especially to produce or create something

Answer 9

I found out a bit late of this follow up, but I will be re-iterating what I already wrote in my other answer, though this time round I focused purely on the calculations of the number.

Proposal

• Questions
  • Non-deleted only
• Answers - Views of the parent question for answers that are:
  • Non-deleted AND
  • Score > 0 AND
  • Multiplied by the factor of users that on average scrolls to answers in this position AND
  • Answer is posted within a week of the question IF NOT
    • Multiplied by the difference in dates (incorrectly) assuming a linear distribution of views

What is this solving: Answer position

Right now, a question with three answers will always count all answer, yet a question like this will count 17 (!!!) answers equally, whilst the large large majority of those 243723 viewers of that last question will never ever scroll past the first answer. So what I am proposing is that Stack Exchange temporarily adds tracking code that tracks actual answer views based on scroll position (this is really easy to program and they might already have this data) and next this data would be applied globally as multiplication factors. In other words, you would get a list of global factors like [1, .4, .2, .1, .09, .06, .......] for example with the average number of views answers in a certain position get. Of course, it's still an approximation (because of the generalization), but at least it's a FAR better approximation.

What is this solving: Posting date

Especially assuming that the above is for whatever reason not implemented then right now users will try to game the system¹ by searching for posts with the largest number of viewcounts with at most two answers. If they post an answer and get at least one upvote they now grab the full views of the post. Alternatively from the previous solution - or per this proposoal; in addition to - it is also possible to assume that views come in in a linear fashion (absolutely not true, but it keeps it nice and simple) and distribute views that way. Additionally answers within one week would be counted fully, for the simple reason that that keeps the calculation faar cheaper (as a lot of answers are given within that timeframe). The reason for this approach is that it's possible to do these calculations purely with the data that is available now and would make the calculated number far more precise.

¹ Which I don't think a lot of users will be wasting time on, as the metric is only shown on a profile tab users themselves will not commonly look at.

Answer 10

How about keeping the algorithm simple:

                    (views on question) * (score of your answer)
"people helped" = ------------------------------------------------
                    (total votes on entire question and answers)

(I'm using "people helped" for now, but I'm not actually proposing that as a name.)

Other considerations:

• "score of your answer" = upvotes - downvotes
• "total votes on entire question" = upvotes + downvotes*

*Because all votes up or down came from a view. IOW, some views didn't actually help anyone (especially if they downvoted)

---

Pros:

• Asymptotically meaningful.
• More resistant to gaming on popular questions.
• Encourages answering of unanswered questions with a lot of views.

Cons:

• Potential for noisy "up-and-down" effects as explained in comments.

---

Possible Tweaks:

• Replace "total votes on all posts" with "total upvotes on all posts". (suggested by Servy)
• Include anonymous feedback.

Answer 11

I think this is a variant on what David Mulder suggested:

It seems clear that 'views' is way too high. I know that when I'm searching for help, I'll happily open the first 10 links in 10 tabs and often not even get as far as reading the last ones (or conversely, I can get to the end still not have been 'helped').

But do you have any statistics on how long people tend to stay on pages? And whether it depends on the number of answers (or just the length of text)? In that case you could apply some kind of global 'factor' to bring the view count down to something a bit more realistic.

Answer 12

I'd like to argue for restoring the people helped phrase while also making the calculation more conservative.

Let's acknowledge upfront that this number is a pleasant fiction—we can't poll everyone who visits every question to find out which (if any) answer helped the most. And there's no reasonable way to know if a post helped anyone other than by measuring votes. (We already have a system for estimating people helped from direct voting: reputation.) In almost every way it doesn't matter what number we pick as long as it goes up each time a user asks or answers a question helpfully. When numbers get large (over a few hundred) it's really difficult to visualize them. The only way we can relate to large numbers is to compare them to other large numbers.

The trouble with using the label "people helped" is that we have various measures of how many people visit the site. MSE is visited by fewer than 10k people a day, so it seems off to report a couple million people helped. Maybe that's a bad example; Jeff has probably helped more people than that in one way or another. But as you poke around at other people's profiles, you inevitably find folks who helped ~140k people with a Jon Skeet fact. Remember, this site only has 119k registered users.

So we can start eliminating edge cases like Community Wiki, which probably makes sense in any case. However, we are still going to have questions that get outsized views and skew the results in a way that breaks the illusion^* that the number represents actual people being helped. Giving full credit to every view a question gets to every asker and many answerers breaks verisimilitude for me.

My suggestion is to scale down views using a scaling factor that reduces the impact of heavily viewed questions and divides credit between the asker and all the answerers:

With this scaling, an answer to the Jon Skeet facts question potentially counts for something like 3600 people helped. Rather than use the proposed formula for who would get credit, I'd like to suggest that an asker gets credit for helping that many people their question:

1. has at least one answer,
2. has a score greater than 0, and
3. is not Community Wiki.

An answer would get credit for helping people if it:

1. has a score greater than 0, and
2. is not Community Wiki.

Note that for often-answered questions (which are also often highly-viewed) this will credit more answers than the original formula. However, given the log scaling, the total "people helped" credit will be a lot lower. These criteria also prevents unanswered and negatively-scored questions from counting as helping the people who merely viewed the question.

Under this algorithm, Jeff Attwood will have still helped 379k people on MSE. Jon Skeet will have helped 9.6 million folks on SO (compared to 103 million. These numbers feel right to me. They are absolutely wrong, but they are also usefully plausible.

---

* The illusion is more important than any semblance of accuracy. The designer of the Civilization computer games, Sid Meier, notes:

Gameplay is a psychological experience: I base my games on things like railroads, pirates, and history, and I try to make the games I design true and real. The more historical, the more realistic, and the more factual, the better. The more railroady and piratey, the better. But what I thought I knew was wrong. During the early days of my career, I hadn’t taken into account what was in the player’s head. By acknowledging that simple concept—that gameplay is a psychological experience—it can make your games better.

Answer 13

Possibly off-topic though I believe it to be an underling factor:
Nothing other than vote count belies the usefulness of a post in the first place. Even then, one has to look at its age and compare it with views and votes. A five year old post with 100k views and +300 votes isn't any more pertinent than one from 6 months ago with 2k views and +20 votes. I have to perform this mysterious calculation in my head to determine a page's Usefulness Score.

For example this page's score would be through the roof at the moment, as it should be. Later, as it ages, it will become less so (useless to all but meta SE's posterity). Also, vote count means absolutely nothing. I'm somewhat of a stickler for how to vote, but even I still find myself voting for the wrong reasons; humor, haz pic, ect. Not always whether a post was "useful". +1 can mean all sorts of things.

You can't pull a new stat out of the air with the current data set. I'd say out of the ~1000 upvotes I've cast, ~5 are for something that was actually useful to me, as opposed to me judging that it might be useful to someone. We need a 'tick' like the favorites button for every answer; "this is the suggestion that worked for me". Who left it up to the OP to decide what is right? Where is the community's accepted answer? You know, the one under the accepted answer with 700 more upvotes than it... (limit one a day, or people will just click both when they upvote anyway) Perhaps some positive Flags would work too.

Here's a great example (although I don't agree with the content, numbers like this are what I mean): Gender-neutral alternative to “craftsmanship”? IMO, no one should ever find that page useful and I think the OP barely did themselves. The numbers on that page only tell us how uppity we can get. Nevermind what the hotlist can do to skew a page's numbers... that's a whole 'nother sack of beans.

---

TL;DR

You will get no "solid approximation" based off of meaningless anomalies (votes).

We have absolutely no way of knowing "that someone in the community found it helpful" (you delete those comments, remember?)

Any answer that adds little: ignore all "Late Answers" . Only people who don't care about rep late-answer.

Erring on the side of including views is meaningless; view doesn't mean I read it.

The closet thing we have is the favorites button. I use them as bookmarks when I find something I know I'll want reference to. Not to link later but for my own use in the real world. I think a lot of people use them to keep tabs on pages they're watching; still it's a better number to draw 'usefulness' from. However, you can only Favorite questions; not "this is my favorite answer, 'cause it worked for me". That information gets lost in the (phantom) votes.

Answer 14

Since an Accepted answer has a very high chance of actually being read (and even helping viewers), I think an Accepted answerer should always be credited -- even if the vote count was 0. We should not penalize the answerer just because the asker happened to be too new to SO to be able to upvote (or to know that they could).

So, I'd propose changing:

Score > 0 AND

to

(Score > 0 OR Is the Accepted Answer) AND

If this is done, then effectively we would credit the answerer of all undeleted accepted answers.

Answer 15

Psophometric assistance factor

OK, OK. Don't look at me like that.

Here's the rationale:

1. it's designed to be in line with human perception
2. it's trying to show how people have been assisted
3. it's an estimate
4. it doesn't really have an obvious unit of measure

The word "psophometric" is fairly obscure, but it essentially means a measurement that's adjusted according to some model of human perception. For example, audio engineers use a "psophometric weighting" to quantify human perception of noise. We are searching for a similar kind of adjustment that matches our collective perception of this notion, and will adjust it until it (subjectively, but by some consensus) matches our concept of what it means to meaningfully participate here.

The word "assistance", while perhaps speculative (we don't really know that people were assisted, we infer it from indirect measurements) captures something about what we're at least attempting to quantify.

The word "factor" simultaneously conveys both the notion that it's not the whole thing but just one part, and the notion that it's unitless and not really convertible to furlongs or kilograms or cat-video-viewing-hours or any other physical measurement with real units.

The other thing is that because the phrase is very likely to be unique on the internet, anyone searching for the definition would likely get sent to the correct place(s) among the Stack Exchange constellation of sites.

Answer 16

The only thing that would make sense to me is showing a statistic on the anonymous votes on one's posts. Reasons:

1. This statistic is never shown and could be really interesting and significant.

2. Registered users can vote on the Qs and As, so their opinion on the post is reflected in reputation.

3. Non-registered users can vote through the anonymous feedback. Their visit itself may be very well irrelevant noise, and very often it probably is.

4. I still don't see how views correlate to usefulness, so I don't see why we want to measure that and give it any name containing "useful" or "helpful".

However, if we want to keep the statistic based on votes, it should be named after what it is: Posts Popularity, or similar.

Answer 17

Ignoring zero-score questions might slightly penalize people who contribute a lot to niche categories. I think a lot of my answers have zero rep because a) they are the only answer, and b) they have only helped one or two people, and c) those people don't know how this site works so they don't vote or accept answers.

I don't have a concrete suggestion. Maybe include answers that are more than, say, two months old and have zero points and are the only answer, and the question is by someone who hasn't voted on anything. Or something like that. Maybe that number would be so small for almost everyone as to be useless.

Answer 18

The way search engines infer the "satisfaction" with their service is by measuring the time a user spends with a link they clicked. If the user comes back in less than 5 seconds (or another arbitrary cutoff, there is probably research on that) to click on the next search result or to start a new query, he counts as "unsatisfied".

Now this is not a perfect metric, but it's a part of how Google and Bing manage to show you stuff which not just has a high page rank, but is also relevant to your query. It's technically called dwell time and described in papers such as this one.

I realize that Stack Exchange is probably not tracking this metric yet. But if it is, that number could certainly be included in the formula. And if not, it might have internal uses beside profile decoration, which could make it worthwhile to track.

Answer 19

Unsure of one of the constraints you have as it contradicts a couple of badges, notably:

It's okay that it can't separate views that came before your answer, so long as it's very unusual that an answer posted way after the question on a popular question will count.

Which potentially goes against the Revival and Necromancer badges:

Necormancer
Answered a question more than 60 days later with score of 5 or more

This is perhaps quite a common case, as the Necromancer badge on SO appears to be the only Silver badge that has been awarded more times than its bronze equivalent:

Actually, re-reading the text on those, they are only loosely related as the Bronze is only awarded if you're the First answer where as the Silver can be awarded for any answer.

Answer 20

Could you, going forward, keep a separate page view counter for each answer that only starts increasing once the answer is posted? For example, let's say I write a question that gets a million views in its first week of existence and a super-popular answer with a ton of upvotes. The question itself and the first few answers would all have their own view counts, stored separately, and all of these counters increase every time someone views the page.

Then, a year later, a new users arrives a posts an insightful answer. On the day it's posted, it also gets its own view counter that starts at 0. It also increases every time someone views the question, but starts out much lower than the views the older question and answers already have. Over the course of several months, the new answer gets five upvotes and the question is viewed a few hundred more times. Once the answer gets its fifth upvote, the hundreds of views it garnered are added to the user's "people helped" count.

class Question {
    int viewCount;
    List<Answer> answers;

    public void logPageView() {
        viewCount++;
        for(Answer answer : answers) {
            // Every time the question is viewed, all its answers also get views
            answer.logPageView();
        }
    }
}

class Answer {
    // Starts at zero when the answer is posted
    // Use this number in "people helped" statistic
    int viewCount;

    public void logPageView() {
        // Called every time the associated question is viewed
        viewCount++;
    }
}

Answer 21

Some of what I am writing may seem or even clearly is horribly unfeasible – but I will address these issues in the end:

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[…] nor can we count just the views on a question page that came in after a given answer was posted.

But you have the times of votes, which are correlated in time with the visits of a user that can vote, which in turn is correlated with overall views. Thus, as a first estimate you can estimate the temporal distribution of views by taking the temporal distribution of votes and just renormalise it by multiplying it with [number of views]/[number of votes]. Two tweaks to this:

• Only regard the first votes of a user on a post instead of all votes, since this gives a better estimate of the visits of a user capable of voting.

• The above estimate is certainly not perfect, e.g., I would expect the temporal mean of the distribution of actual views to be somewhat later than that of the distribution of votes, because the first votes come from SE power users and not from people having a similar problem. However, the error due to this is mostly systematic, i.e., it behaves similarly for all questions. Thus in order to correct for it, you only need to look at the actual temporal distribution of views (and votes) for a few questions, not all of them. Even if you do not have any data about this at all, it may suffice to start generating this data now, as the biggest discrepencies between those two distributions will likely occur shortly after the question is asked – or with other words: Those distributions have similar tails.

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But, of course, you can deal without estimating the actual temporal distribution of views, because the stat needs (or even should) not estimate how many people viewed a question but to how many people it was useful to some extent. As already mentioned in some of the other answers, the only way we have to evaluate this are votes. Unfortunately, not every visitor is able to vote, but we can use the voters as proxies for the viewers. Given that you can only vote on what’s actually there, this also automatically addresses the problem of late answers to some extent. The resulting stat would be:

                               number of visitors 
score (per question) = ———————————————————————————————————  ×  upvotes
                        number of visitors that could vote

Some remarks on this:

• An automatic feature is that this accounts for questions which are popular but lack good answers.

• I chose only to include consider upvotes here, since I consider this the better measure for helpfulness to some extent (also considering downvotes would be more complicated since there may be a relevant number of visitors that can upvote but not downvote).

• An obvious tweak would be to give more weight to upvotes by the asker as well as the accepted answer (with due consideration to the existence of askers who never upvoted or accepted anything).

• Another take on this would be to ignore views, views by potential voters and votes happening shortly after the question was posted, with exception of votes and checkmarks by the asker. This way, you would get a better estimate for people who probably had a problem similar to the asker. This would again require a good estimate of the temporal distribution of visits and visits by users who could vote, as described in the first part of this answer. (If you want to go even further, exclude everything happening shortly after the question has been bumped.)

• Of course, this requires that you have in some way recorded the number of visitors who could vote or at least have a good estimate for it, such as the number of logged-in visitors. If not, the next-best comparable score arguably is the one suggested by Mysticial.

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While I am no database expert, I can guess that some of my (and other) suggestions may seem unfeasible due to requiring too many queries. However, it may very well be, that a fraction of an individual user’s post makes up for most of his score. In that case, it suffices to be precise for only those important posts.

Answer 22

I can only suggest an idea for the second big question

Big Question #2: What's a better name?

I've just spent the best of two hours reading all the connecting links, stories, anecdotes, tweets, etc. that populated and generated from Aaron Swartz's twenty-six years of life.

And although I couldn't possibly say I know what he must have been like in life, I am struck by the number of connections I have made in those two hours. Connections that are directly related to my own life, connections which shed a tiniest glimpse of light into what makes a man, woman, or young person passionate about something. I know nothing, nor am I particularly interested in the Python programming language, or anything to do with "cyber" technology, but nevertheless I have made discoveries following Aaron Swartz's links, tweets, and blog posts.

As a result I thought of the following:

- [10k] visitors connected

I think the verb connect can be interpreted on different levels

1. Bring together or into contact so that a real or notional link is established.
2. Provide or have a link or relationship with (someone or something).
3. Link to a source of [information] supply.

Answer 23

Score > 0 AND

So, Unsung Heroes, aren't really heroes for that stat?

Answer 24

BogoMIPS

(or something similar--BogoHelps?) would be a better name, because it admits outright that it's bogus.

Jon Skeet has apparently "reached" nearly an order of magnitude more "people" than there are developers in the world.

Are extra terrestrials now reading SO?

Answer 25

I think this is an awesome idea. I'm also thinking it'll be a better indicator of a users value than rep count, if other stats like the ones alluded to do materialise.

However, I agree with Erwin that the name should be as unambiguous as possible.

Posts Viewed X Times is pretty unambiguous but I think it could be improved to Posts Visited X Times. Visited is even less ambiguous than Viewed in my opinion, as it is more suggestive that people revisit posts at a later date which I believe is closer to the truth.

I have personally visited many posts over and over again all across the network, some that I've answered, some I've posted and some that I learn from, copy code snippets or follow instructions from. I think from what I read of how page views are counted, that many of my own visits will have registered more than one page view, especially with different devices on different connections; as well as just revisiting a few days/weeks later.

So to summarise and reiterate:

       Posts Visited X Times

                would be closest to the truth.

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On a different note, I think it would be cool if we had a choice between 3 or 4 options, adding a layer of personalisation / customisation to our profiles and making each slightly more unique in the process. (Someone suggested something like this in one of the billion comments.)

Answer 26

Use multiple formulae and take a mean (or mode, or median or whatever statistical method that seems appropriate)

I suggest use of more than one different formulae, each having different pros and cons. So one formula may be soft on those who give answers on popular questions very late, but other formula would have a opposite behaviour so they together should balance each other.

Stuff you may use

You could use various stats, some that come to my mind are:

1. The more votes other answers with higher votes have, the lesser would be the reach (effect or helping power) of an answer. For example, an answer with five votes on a question having another answer with 50 votes will have lesser reach than an answer with five votes but, another answer having only seven votes.
2. Taking a product of views and votes and some constant of Stack Exchange may be useful than just considering views. Also consider point #1.
3. Ignore views in the first N days. You may ignore views in the first N days, because the initial views are generally by active users wandering around. They are not the ones who are helped. N will depend upon the specific site.

I'll add more things as I remember them.

Answer 27

Sounds like a nice idea, but not really. The following reasons are in my mind now:

• Easy to cheat as long as the views count is not recorded in a way to track how many visits are there in a specific day.
• To my knowledge, web crawlers have a big effect on visits, adding more visits which will affect the result, making it more useless.
• Reputation is accurate, and shows a glimpse of how helpful a person is.
• In addition to reputation, we have badges, tags that every user is good at, vote count, activity, etc. All these items are accurate.

IMHO, an index composed of accurate data is much better, it doesn't have to be "people helped". My main reason behind this is the result I got from the query posted in data.se, it shows that I have helped 700,000 people in Travel.SE, I am sure I haven't helped even 10% of that number.

Answer 28

My problem with "people reached" is that there's a huge potential for double (or worse) counting here: if I keep posting, say, great Minecraft answers, then great, I'm helping a lot of people, but I'm probably not helping a distinct set of people each and every time. The prototype just sums views together.

It's more accurately a measure of the total number of times my contributions have been helpful.

That doesn't really help us get to name it properly, but I don't think it's appropriate to call the things that are being counted "people".

How about, perhaps: "metaphorical days saved." If a post of mine is helpful, it might've saved someone's day, metaphorically speaking. It's fine to double count days, and you can even scale it up seamlessly to count "metaphorical months", "metaphorical years", "metaphorical millenniums", etc.

And here's the killer feature: if you're feeling really cheeky, you can call it "metatime" ("metaday", "metayear", ...).

Answer 29

I have an idea. Note, that I am not saying it is better, it just reflects the "number of people helped", most answerers seemed to desire. And I agree more and more! If you are not after that, you can stay with the existing system, which clearly has advantages, most notably including unregistered users. However, there are grave disadvantages, namely counting people who didn't even like your answer and counting people multiple times.

We want to measure people, right? Why bother with the inflated and unsatisfactory views? I would simply stick with registered users. My site, German Language Stack only has about 10K. The most straightforward way to determine, whether I ever helped someone, is to track, whether they ever upvoted any of my answers. You could make this strikter, if you wanted.

Anyway, the whole data for this is just a 10K x 10K matrix with binary entries. I don't see difficulty in storing that. Probably the matrix is sparse, then it's even easier to store.

You don't need to update this calculation life! You already store all activities. Once per month you check for the matrix. The non zero elements don't even need to be checked. If the matrix ever turns dense, because most people have upvoted each other, you just reverse the role of 1 and 0. I don't know, how the community works, so I can't offer good design ideas.

Personally, I am fine with omitting unregistered users, because I very much prefer a conservative estimate to an inflated one. But I understand that is purely a matter of taste. In this context, I would like to know what percentage of viewers the unregistered users represent. For the views to have some advantage, it would have to be high. I assume there are striking differences between answers with high and low votes. For votes below 50 I suspect most traffic is generated by the asker and a bunch of answerers that visit it 5-10 times each. A typical answer on my site has 2-3 answers. With my assumptions, that would generate 15-40 views from the askers and answerers.

Another thing is, if we are in favour of views, can't we at least separate IPs? That way, I don't give my answer ten views when I return to edit it, as I usually do. Still, some people would be counted twice and some rare groups of people would count as one, but It should be a great improvement. Even if I just stored the IPs for one day, aiming at something like "separate views" instead of "separate IPs".

Personally, I used to be really proud of this number. I thought "it probably won't be 14K" but let's say it's 1500". But now that I know how the statistic came about I can never look at it with pride again. Even a person who scrolled to Mary's answer thinking "hell, is Ludi's answer crap!", now counts as having been helped :(

Due to the intense disappointment this has caused me, I find myself contemplating even the following somewhat user unfriendly method for unregistered users: showing a long(!) preview of the answer and letting them click "continue". Though this can't measure helpfulness, it can measure interest at least.

Answer 30

Just to add another drop of rain to the brainstorm, how about "wingspan"?

The more people you help, or the more that see your answers, or whatever, the bigger your wingspan.

Connotations with majestic birds -- the greater the wingspan the further they may fly. Connotations with airplanes -- roughly, the bigger the wingspan, the more they can carry (meaning either how many people you can carry, or how much support you can deliver to people).

Plus, it's ever so slightly whimsical.