Thank you for sharing your valuable experience. I also had similar experience last year but I prefer Medium for various reasons you mentioned. However the discrepancy reminds me of our newsletters which gets under 100 views on Medium and over 12,000 views on Substack. So Medium algorithm is unfortunately restricting our newsletters not showing our 66K followers even though we serve to the growth of this platform more than Subtack. Despite all we feel at home and support Medium as we have wonderful writers and readers interacting beautifully.