Re: Wanted players: silliness.
The Game Proposals thread is where I think this would be most useful. A lot of games I see there don't have the system decided yet, and often wait to see what the players think before picking one.
Unlike the Players wanted section, Game proposals doesn't have a lot of preset information to search by. The proposed games might not be of a certain genre, system, or anything else that someone searching for games might look through. So in game proposals section, how do people decide whether to read a thread or not, by the title.
Personally I wouldn't see a counter as measuring interest, but rather it measures the opposite. It is a means to figure out that your proposal/advertisement is not grabbing their interest, which is a very important thing to know, even if you don't know why they aren't interested.
It would be helpful to know that if you haven't got any views, that might be why no one is responding to it, thus no need to give up hope on the concept just yet as no one has really seen the concept, try some patience first, then after a week, just either try changing the title if in the Game proposal section, or perhaps go make a thread on the Game proposal section asking for advice about it, so folks can tell you why they think no one is looking at it (such as "it is a rare system" "it is an uncommon genre" etc).
On the other hand, if you have lots of views but no one is indicating interest, that means you are likely better off dropping it altogether and trying some other concept.
Basically, if no one has seen your idea, then you need to go find people to look at it. If people have seen it, but give no word, then that says something about your concept.