Simple flaw in steemit that could be exploited for potential gain
I noticed something... interesting... about the view counter on one of my own posts. It was an older post that never got many views in the first place, and certainly shouldn't be getting any now.
I closed the tab and reopened it a minute or two later, and the view counter went up.
So I refreshed. And the view counter went up again. And again. And again.
So I opened my introduceyourself post, and refreshed it. View counter kept climbing.
I'm not sure if the view count is a factor in any of the post sorting algorithms, but if it is, this needs to be addressed. I could easily rack up a few hundred views on my own posts every 10 minutes. A group of bots could rack up thousands.
There isn't really a "report a problem" field or a suggestion box, so I'm posting it here...
Suggestions to the devs:
Suggestion box. Or even a permanent #suggestion topic/submarket. The #support tag is... not that. If this exists and I just couldn't find it, feel free to call me an idiot. If this doesn't exist, why not?
Pretty easy to prevent counting repeated views from the same account/ip/session, given the facts that accounts exist and you've placed five cookies on my computer (two steem-specific, two google analytics, one for your AWS load-balancing). Plenty of options.
If views aren't an algorithmic factor, this has little potential for exploitation beyond the effect of high view counts on human observers. Probably still worth fixing.
If views are a factor, this needs to be solved before it's exploited at scale.