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I answered a question on Chem.SE earlier today and noticed just now that it'd made it to HNQ. This got me wondering just how big the HNQ Effect™ is in terms of a jump in pageviews.

I found a handful of other questions using auxiliary data to estimate time trends, but all of them rely on that auxiliary data having an independent CreationDate or other interaction timestamp that represents a proxy for that action.

Can I plot the ViewCount for a given @PostID over time with SEDE? Given that the database appears to be a snapshot in time, and that ViewCount seems to be a "thin" quantity without associated time-/datestamp information, I'm not very hopeful... but! This is why we ask.

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No, you can't plot viewcount over time from SEDE.

The viewcount is recorded in the posts table for question types (posttypeid = 1) and that table only holds the last known value.

Significant actions on a post are kept in the posthistory table but a view is not considered to be a significant event and isn't stored there either.

Your only option is to track questions by your self that appear in the hot questions list and their viewcount (which is available from the Stack API) and store that in your own datastore at regular intervals for processing later.

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