I mean that could be happening but there’s no data to back that up so we can’t be 100% sure. The closest we can get is conducting polls to ask writers what they’re seeing, which I did on Twitter and got 85 responses.. It seems that, across the board, there’s more writers seeing less views than there are writers seeing more views. If the views are getting taken from the small “oligarchy" of Medium (IE the whales of Medium who command hundreds of thousands of views per month) and spread to the vast majority of newer writers, shouldn’t we be seeing a big increase in writers reporting they’re seeing higher views?

Right now it just seems the reach sucks for everybody. I think a variety of things are happening here.. with some of what you said contributing to it, for sure. I started seeing the algorithm crush me back in October/November. I just think the major reason behind all this lies with the algorithm. I think they made a big mistake with their algo somewhere.