Apologies, I forget that if you haven't written your own articles you might not have those metrics. They are from left to right. Views (number of people who have opened your article) Reads (number of people who then went on to read it in full) the read ratio (the percentage of people who opened it who went onto read it) and finally the number of fans.

If you write something with a clickbait title and it's opened and then clicked away from, you'd have a low view to read ratio. The medium algorithm pays on the amount of reading time rather than views. The ideal story is both lengthy and fully read by everyone.

Medium did used to be paid by number of fans. The little clap button. But this led to pieces with popular viewpoints being overclapped whilst more thoughtful pieces with high levels of engagement were ignored.

The reality is that nobody really understands how everything is calculated. I suspect there's a strong relationship between how active you are on the site and how much the algorithm pushes your pieces to regular readers - but I don't know exactly. The current model is 'relational' which suggests they're after more interactions between readers and writers rather than the very simple broadcast pieces they had in 2019 - 2020.

That's the beauty of Medium, the management is esoteric and hit-and-miss. Nobody is ever sure exactly what is going on. It's a Rosicrucian rollercoaster! Glad you're still enjoying the pieces - if you start writing on the platform you'll get to experience the joys of the stats page firsthand! :o)