I would love to see a feature in Summit that shows how many times a post has been viewed, similar to Reddit.

Currently, upvotes and comments give us some idea of how a post is performing, but they don’t tell us how many people have actually viewed it. A post might receive hundreds of views but only a few upvotes or comments, and there’s currently no easy way to measure that reach.

  • Post view counts: Display the total number of views on each post.

  • View statistics: Allow users to see how many people have viewed their own posts.

  • Real-time or periodic updates: Keep view counts updated as more people see a post.

  • Privacy-friendly implementation: Count views without tracking individual users or exposing their identities.

I think this would be a great addition to Summit. It would help users understand how far their posts are reaching, whether they’re sharing discussions, news, questions, or other content.

I understand that Lemmy is a federated platform, so implementing this feature might require additional work to track views across different instances. It would be worth exploring how to handle that while respecting user privacy.

What do you think? Would you like to see Reddit-style post view counts in Summit app?

  • alianne@lemmy.world
    5·
    1 day ago

    Is this a statistic that Lemmy itself tracks? I haven’t heard one way or the other, but if it doesn’t then I’m not sure how realistic it would be for Summit to implement. It could maybe show you how many times you personally have viewed a post (not sure how valuable that is, though) or how many times a Summit user has viewed a post, but the latter feels like a bit too much data collection for questionable return, imo.

    If this is something that Lemmy already tracks, though, then adding an option to view it would be great! More options in general is always my preference, even if I don’t necessarily make use of them myself.