I’m not above the ego boost of seeing my viewership rise (or see where it baselines to if I’ve been offline for a couple of days). But is it useful as it could be?
Of course not.
- Once you get over a threshold of n views, the Stats All Views page becomes unusable. I’m pretty sure I’m there already. Plus, the All Time views zooms out to three years, so you can’t see any detail if you’ve only been on for one.
- No breakdown of views or upvotes by topic, so you’re not getting truly useful information about trends.
- Even for the 7-day views, updates and navigates like a dog. Contrary to Quora’s UI philosophy, which seems to be stuck in 2010, infinite scroll is not the solution to all UI problems.
- You can’t see others’ views, so you can’t do any real benchmarking.
- No insight into how questions went viral (e.g. correlation with digest, with friendship networks)
- No isolation of non-follower upvotes, which would tell you a lot more than aggregate upvotes do.
- No tracking of links and citations, which is a much more meaningful metric of impact.
- And, well, any ability to answer the kinds of questions Laura Hale grapples with on quora numbers
Quora is replete with TWs saying how crap the stats page is, and that it should be taken out and shot in the back of the head. To which I can only say, Quora UI misfeatures present a target-rich environment.
But I do check it once a day, just to see if any questions have gone viral, for whatever inexplicable reason. It’s not like I’ll get an explanation out of the current stats page.