David Pierce writes: “Views are the most visible metric on the internet. You can see, in more or less real time, how many views something got on YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, and most other video platforms. A view is the universal currency of success—more views, more fun. But it’s all nonsense. Views are nothing. Views are lies. A ‘view,’ in reality, is not a universal metric. It’s not really anything. It is whatever a platform wants it to be, which usually has no actual correlation to whether someone actually encountered and experienced a piece of content.”