Question: I posted this ([python how to rerun program?](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/29686553/python-how-to-rerun-program/29686703?noredirect=1#comment47510721_29686703)) and there's nothing that bugs me more than an unexplained down vote. Sometimes I feel like since I have lower reputation my responses are shrugged off as insignificant. Was I wrong?

The worst part is almost identical code received an up vote that was posted later probably just because of reputation.

Answer: 
The people reached statistic is a rough guesstimate of how many views all your posts have. A single view is considered to be equivalent with a single user.

There is however one slight problem with the calculation of that number. The view count is only stored for a question, not for each answer. So you can only be 100% sure a question is viewed. For questions with multiple answers you are at a loss. Also note that only the total viewcount up to this date is stored. The viewcount history isn't stored in SEDE, and AFAIK not even in the production schema.

Hence the trickery in a query using data that was already available since 2008 to also give some people reached credits to answers, as explained in [We're working on a new stat to help convey the reach of your posts here](https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/244534/were-working-on-a-new-stat-to-help-convey-the-reach-of-your-posts-here) over on MSE.

From that post this is the formula:

* **Questions**

	+ Non-deleted only
* **Answers** - Views of the parent question for answers that are:

	+ Non-deleted AND
	+ Score > 0 AND
	+ Also meets one or more of the following criteria:
		- In the top 3 answers OR
		- Is the Accepted Answer OR
		- Score at least 5 OR
		- Has at least 20% of the total vote count

Specially if you have an answer that is around a score of 5 on a highly viewed question will result in big jumps in that number with single up- or down vote.

If you want to play a bit with that formula use the [SEDE query](https://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/253267/people-helped-public-prototype-1?UserId=811) or the improved one offered by Martin Smith: <https://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/756276/people-reached?UserId=149428>
The results from the query in the accepted answer aren't correct. It will include all questions where the user has a positively scored answer as even though it includes ranking code to calculate the top 3 answers belonging to that question it omits to check that the user has one of those answers...

An alternative SEDE query is here <https://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/757338/people-reached>

For user ids [236247](https://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/757338/people-reached?UserId=236247) and [149428](https://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/757338/people-reached?UserId=149428) (who both commented on the accepted answer) the results are much closer to what is shown on the site.

NB: Any query using SEDE is going to be vulnerable to the issue of out dated data however. A single vote on a question with a million views can tip the balance between those views being counted or not and this might not exist in the data dump yet.

So this query result includes all candidate questions though only those with "true" in the eligible result column are counted. But seeing the view count for non eligible questions may help with manual investigation of sudden changes.