My view count changed in early March 2015; what happened?

1 Answer
Mar 23, 2015

There was a bug in how we calculated views, and we fixed it.

As an early stage company with a never-ending list of challenges, one of our engineering and product principles is to release MVPs (Minimum Viable Products), learn from them, and then improve them once we understand the product better.

In this case, we built and released the profile page map, along with view counts, after roughly two days of work. I've written about the process in a blog post.

We eventually realized that the way we were calculating views was incorrect. We were initially counting all the historical views on a question, and awarding them all to any user that contributed to the question/answer.

The correct solution was to only count the views for a user from the moment they contributed to a question.

We finally fixed this a few weeks ago, and that caused the view counts for some users to drop.

The good news is that (1) it's now correct, and (2) if you're reading this, you're on Socratic in its infancy, and the majority of your views and students helped are in the future :)