It is probably a personality issue, but in my mind doing any sort of work without some form of feedback starts to lose its appeal... you need to know that it is helping someone. I used to write articles for MSDN, and I would get view #s, but as much as I liked to see those, I was much more motivated by the response I received (emails or blog posts about my articles, etc...). What really sucks (to me) is when you publish content without any feedback mechanism in place, so there is no real way to know if people are reading it or not... or what they think. My articles on xbox.com don't have any form of commenting or rating, and while I'm sure they track views, they don't tell me what the traffic #s are. The result can be feeling like you are pushing content out into a vacuum, producing no results of any kind.
I think comments are more important than views, but you get more comments by being controversial, so views are an important measure as well. Back at MSDN, we spent quite a bit of time trying to convince the site management that what mattered was the deviation from the mean ... so looking at #s was pointless... we needed to know if an article received a significant number of views less than or more than articles tended to receive. The same is true on C9, only by knowing the traffic that all posts tend to receive can you really say that one post is getting a good or bad amount of views.