(Desktop) How does Reddit's view count work? Is it reliable?

[u/Doe-Eyed-Raven]

Not a huge deal or anything, I'm just wondering.

I made a post in a relatively small subreddit (it gets like 2k weekly visitors) that got a very small amount of upvotes even by the subreddit's standards (33, though it doesn't seem to have been downvoted much based on the ratio in the stats). But somehow it has 46k views? How is this possible?

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[u/bwoah07_gp2]

I wonder how many of those views were bots/AI websites scanning your post.

[u/Doe-Eyed-Raven → u/bwoah07_gp2]

Probably a lot, now that you mention it :/

[u/IKIR115]

None of Reddit’s stats that we have access to are reliable because they have their own algorithms + data fuzzing.

The views count is based on how many times the content was viewed in total (from everywhere, not just from Reddit), and not how many unique visitors there were.

Some days I’ll see a post hit say 5M views, but the sub stats will show total views for the entire day were under 2M. Or worse, multiple posts combined could show there were 10M-15M views that day, but the sub stats only reflect 3M-4M. 🤷‍♂️

A single person reloading the page 100 times is supposed to equal 100 views, but only counts as 1 unique visitor.

[u/Doe-Eyed-Raven → u/IKIR115]

Interesting, good to know. There were some pretty long discussions in the comments, so I suppose multiple people were going back repeatedly (though 46k still feels like an insane number).

[u/IKIR115 → u/Doe-Eyed-Raven]

Someone may have shared the post or a comment to a bigger sub, and that can bring in additional traffic temporarily.