For me, it's statistics. I'm earning about 50% of what I made a year ago on Medium, but I have considerably more readers and views now than I had a year ago. My number of followers has at least doubled over the last year. The average number of views on each story is much higher than before.

My completed page views rate is around 75%, so it's not like people are checking them out and getting the hell out.

Stories that are boosted make less for me that the former "Distribution" stories made, again on more views.

I don't discount the argument that the Trump article made "too much" given that it's an easy target, but that seems like an editorial decision, which I don't believe algorithms are in the business of.

Is there a lot of conjecture in my story? Yeah, sure, but it's an attempt to understand an easy fact for me to observe: That, given the same number of views and interactions, each of my articles from the past six months (at least) make considerably less than they did before.

I can't prove you wrong, but I do know what my stats line looks like compared to last year: More views, more engagement, more full reads, less money.

I just checked out your vamp story. Good stuff. We can agree to disagree maybe, but I enjoyed the semi-Screwtape approach.