Remember, it's not "curation" anymore, it's "Distributed," which appears to mean no more than that it isn't blackballed. "Featured" is also pretty meaningless. If you write something long enough that doesn't criticize Medium, you get "Distributed." If your article is "Distributed" it gets tossed in the hopper along with every other non-blackballed article. After that it's just random chance if anyone sees your article.

Medium's central problem now is that it has shifted its business focus from quality to quantity. What your screen shots of story stats show is that readers are all but prevented from seeing any stories older than a few days. "Writers" who are on Medium to produce clickbait to make money rather than produce content that says something meaningful have figured this out and publish pabulum two or three times a day to get those cheap hits after being "Distributed." All of their clickbait stories fill up the hopper, crowding out others.

Medium is becoming just another empty Web site of self-help mush and self-serving rants. https://medium.com/p/can-medium-avoid-becoming-just-another-website-eb7ef855d068

P.S. - that is the only article I've written this year that hasn't been "Distributed."