Yes, the main feedback from HN back then was that we don't have any click-through or impression data. That is true, and we don't want to introduce any user trac

Yes, the main feedback from HN back then was that we don't have any click-through or impression data. That is true, and we don't want to introduce any user tracking to make our idea possible. That was a very hard nut to crack, but after a year of research we finally think we have a practical solution: Instead of views, we estimate the attention a story has received. The main idea is to track how much time a story spent on different ranks. We created a causal statistical model to approximate the amount of attention a story gets on specific ranks. These are used to calculate a total accumulative attention number for every story. This attention value is then used instead of the views mentioned in the article. That's the main idea. A more detailed writeup will be published, together with the implementation of that frontpage.