How can these view counts be accurate?

[Waus]

I was looking at the view counts on some of these threads - can these possibly be right? I started a thread about music you stick with in Other Music and it says it has almost 1,200 views. How. How does a quiet thread on a forum in the corner of BBMB with like, 4 posts in it get that many views?

[Guy Incognito]

Bots?

[Waus]

Bots?

Yea.

[TurdBerglar]

google searches for big names(pink floyd)?

[Bob]

have you heard about this new band, gatsby arias monetize your blog xxx?

you probably havent heard of them

[Bob]

i posted in this thread as a dumb joke originally

but now that i'm actually looking at the "views" numbers i'm legit worried

how can we even trust data anymore?

for example, day trading is at the whim of robots (http://www.radiolab.org/2013/feb/05/million-dollar-microsecond/)

with results that are unpredictable at best (http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2013/04/ap-twitter-hack-sends-stock-market-spinning.html)

now even on the humble Beastie-Free General Discussion section of the bbmb, the weird corner of the internet where people have been posting for over a decade on a beastie boys message board about alcoholism, about too-long virginity, about cats named george, about esoteric stuff having to do with anything BUT the beastie boys, the robots have found us.

the number of times we click on a thread with our flesh-and-bones-fingers on the beastieboys.com message board and view it? when in your robust human capacity for memory is the last time you can remember any human being caring about that particular number?

that number doesn't matter anymore. not to humans. it's only our incidental word-bait for the robots that matters, even here.

we're as irrelevant as day traders. robots are on top of this now. on top of something as ultimately inconsequential as the bbmb. we're out. robots are in. they make a bigger contribution to the numbers than we can ever hope to.

they might not know why yet, but they're on it

[Guy Incognito]

01110111 01101111 01110010 01100100

[Bob]

lol sometimes i get weird when i'm drunk

[Waus]

lol sometimes i get weird when i'm drunk

I liked that post, but this isn't facebook so I can't let you know without letting you know.

[Bob]

i just assume everyone like all of my posts unless they tell me otherwise, it's cool