"X number of people viewing "

[QueenClinomania]

Is this a new thing you're testing out?
It appears on active convos but only one thread, not all the threads. Does this mean nobody else is reading those threads at this moment or are you only testing it out on a few threads?

I noticed this yesterday and wondered as I hadn't seen anything mentioned by MNHQ.

I went back to Actives and refreshed. Nope, can't see it, i can only see number of replies. Where are you noticing it?

It looks like this.

I noticed it on some FWR threads.

Thanks @Luxio . That actually looks creepy like a peeping tom although I'm sure they didn't mean it like that 😂

Hi OP,

This is a new feature we’ve introduced. It's not on all discussions right now.

The viewing count is designed to give users a sense of how busy a thread is in real time and to help highlight where conversations are most active. We hope it will make it easier to spot lively discussions and encourage engagement across the boards.

As ever, we’re very open to feedback, so do let us know if you have thoughts or suggestions as you use it.

This seems like an odd and unnecessary feature. Posters can see if a thread has been busy by how many posts it has it's not necessarily going to be any busier just because lots of people are viewing it?

Thanks for replying, Lily.
Isn't that what active convos does? Shows you what's being talked about right now?

My thoughts are - doesnt matter to me either way, I was just curious.

Many years ago, I’m pretty sure it use to tell you how many posters had viewed a thread - does anybody else remember that?

Yes Tappa, and it used to be awful to see 120 views but 0 replies on a new thread. I hope they never implement that here.

Yes it was brutal!

So driving traffic away from posters who really require support/info and towards deliberately inflammatory threads?

I don't like it just from a visual clutter point of view. Is it possible to deactivate it in Active, at least?

I'm not sure what value it has? It does seem like pointless clutter.

Yeah and sometimes someone would start a thread asking posters to go and reply to the unanswered threads so that they didn’t get ignored. I can’t imagine that happening these days.

So despite recieving negative feedback it's now appearing on almost every thread on active.

I mean, you’ve got Trending, Active, and Post count. I think it’s already quite easy to spot the popular threads?

I don’t like it. I don’t need to know that. And view counts don’t equal engagement m.

I think it's misleading - I often click on a thread and then click off straightaway as it's of no interest absolute lalaland bollocks Would that count as "viewing"?

Improving moderation of misinformation, including deletion would help to encourage engagement across the boards.

Even when hard evidence (government stats, legal definitions etc ) are provided with a report to MNHQ, the answer is invariably ‘useful for discussion’.

This just perpetuates lies and incites division.

Honestly, I go off to work for a few hours and come back to this. 😂

I don't understand why MNHQ keep introducing features that nobody wants. I'm still irritated by the "Original Poster" and "My Posts" tags. Totally unnecessary when they're already different colours from the other posts.

I think this feature isn't needed, surely if one post has lots of views and another post has no views. The poster with no views is going to end up feeling like shit. In a world where tech teams are trying to limit social media emotional harms etc I think mumsnet have dropped the ball on this one.

It does seem recently they've introduced a lot of features which seem unnecessary. The my post label, the floating watch button and now this new viewing count.

I must say it's also showing just how quiet the site is these days even compared to a few months ago. Most of the threads on active showing viewers have less than 100 people viewing.

I think it needs to be on all threads or none. At the moment it looks as though the majority of threads are being ignored, which can't be accurate as I'm viewing by most recently active.