Interestingly, the article you wrote in August ("“I Made $10,934 this Month”) is supposedly one of the things they wanted to address with the recent changes.

The distribution system is still flawed.

And as I understand it, one of the way to help increase visibility, commenting on other stories, is now seen as an engagement hack by Medium, so they penalize the writers who get comments from people who comment a lot generally.

It's a mess.