A few hours ago I posted an answer to an old question on StackOverflow
Moments later I've noticed that my impact jumped from ~2K to ~72K
I started researching and discovered that it is a known issue and many people experienced it. I also found the Impact feature discussion on meta. It states that the People Reached for an answer is counted by the views of the question in this method:
- Answers - Views of the parent question for answers that are:
- Non-deleted AND
- Score > 0 AND
- Also meets 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
And my answer does fulfill these terms.
It also states:
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
This is true. Counting the views for answers in this way will be a really resource consuming task.
But there another way to solve this issue:
For every answer, save the question views before the answer was posted
Then the People Reached for an answer can simply be the question's views reduced by this number.
It doesn't cost much (resources or calculation time) and it can make the Impact feature much more relevant and accurate.
I guess it has been thought of before. So why not fixing it in this way?