I don't think the drop in traffic has anything to do with how the algorithm reacts to content I put in my articles. I think it has to do with changes to how Medium populates the feed with respect to, say, follows, post rate, etc.

I still get my articles "distributed," they just don't get appreciable numbers of views through Medium anymore when that happens.

The article I posted yesterday currently has 4 total views on Medium and 24 on Substack.

The one I posted earlier this month on the same topic got a total of 4 views with 1 internal view on Medium after being "chosen for further distribution," and has 5 views on Substack after being exported to the archive.

You may have reach on Medium once you hit 1.6K followers, but I don't see that building up my following on this platform is any easier or harder than building it up elsewhere.