As I mentioned several times, followers do not really matter on Medium. Many avid readers just read and don't care about following. Some people randomly follow and never read. For example, my followers increased almost ten times from my first year on Medium but I did not gain ten times more views or reading times. However, what really mattered from my experience was subscribers as I mentioned in this story https://medium.com/sensible-biohacking-transhumanism/subscribers-can-produce-50-times-better-results-than-followers-for-freelance-writers-d8b9b0ce31c6