Previously, View Count was not incremented based on just a page refresh. Or maybe, it was just not incremented if the author views his own posts. (I could be mistaken on both counts).
I use View Count/Kudos as a metric for how "good" an Idea is on the Idea Exchange is. One that has high Kudos/Views indicates that when people read the Idea, they like it. A low ratio indicates it's a "bad" or unpopular Idea. Even though it's not the most Kudoed Idea, if memory serves I was surprised to learn my most popular Idea in terms of Kudos/Views is Support Unicode, which is wildly more powerful than my highest-Kudoed-yet-flaky-Idea, Allow Distribute Tool to Work on Wires.
When you look at the Idea Exchange in terms of Kudos/Views, you get an interesting perspective and it's clear that more of the powerful Ideas float to the top. When you sort by Kudos alone, and I'll be quite frank here, you're getting a higher concentration of fancy-but-not-very-powerful Ideas at the top.
Ideally, I would rather the "View Count" metric be "Unique Viewers" rather than be incremented each time a page is refreshed. This is a personal opinion, but I think objectively it's a more indicative statistic for anyone paying attention to View Count.
