By talking about "deeper insight" rather than just openly admitting the data is just bad you're just delaying the inevitable backlash.
These numbers are far from meaningless. At the end of the day the numbers reflect what our servers see -- they track something different from Google Analytics but they are useful as a simple ballpark for how interesting or visited your blog post was. Also, they're realtime, which GA does not provide.
If the majority of page views are generates by bots then the number of page views you show isn't even a ballpark figure indicating how interesting/visited the blog post is. It's simply a semi-random number depending on crawlers/bot activity and nothing to do with real human visitors.
If you were simply off by 10% I could accept your answer, but you seem to be regularly off by a factor 200-300%.
http://twitter.com/#!/richiepear/status/13809170130149376
Rich Pearson (VP Marketing - Posterous)
@imranghory No - we just don't filter out your own views
and search engine visits
There's absolutely no indication on Posterous that bots are likely responsible for thousands of the page views shown (which given the long tail nature of Posterous I imagine we're talking about the majority of the page views here for a lot of users).
One user even reported that GA was showing 14 visitors while Posterous was showing 9316:
http://adamriggins.com/posterous-post-views-and-google-analy...
Whenever Posterous has given a response the focus has been on disabled javascript, etc. rather than the fact most of these views are likely generated by bots. For example the email you sent to the user here:
http://www.creativenotice.com/how-posterous-stats-work
Given the values are essentially meaningless why show them to your users at all ?