I run a disco-based website for the local city (a potential readership of computer-literate adults may be under 100k) for the past around 4 years.
Daily page views are just below 1k.
Without going too deep, I can assure that if my site had shown inflated/artificial views, my returning readers from the local city would be approximately 10 times more.
The main reason is that my readers go more for what shows than what is reality. If FB shows that a video has been viewed 1 lakh times and my site article has been viewed 100 times, they think FB has far more reach. They discount the fact that even a 3-second view of a video is counted by FB as ‘One/Single View’.
Maybe I’m not clear enough in what I wanted to say here, but the gist is that ‘what glitters is what sells!’, even if that glitter is not entirely true.
If the Discourse team would allow its users to apply that ‘false’ glitter, then Discourse sites will become much more sellable. As for credibility, let it be decided by the owner of that particular website/community how credible they wish to be viz-a-viz how sellable. Let them choose between long term credibility vs short time survivability.
