Your comments touched my heart as thousands of writers contacted me about the significant declines since August 2023. So you are not alone in facing this issue. The decline is not exclusive to Illumination. I am an editor of 30+ pubs and they all have the same problem. Personally I struggle with organic views despite my 87K and my publications 76K followers and my stories get hardly 100 views. You may check my thoughts in a recent story which might give you some perspectives and reset your expectations about Medium.

https://medium.com/illumination/heres-why-i-started-to-write-for-newsbreak-again-in-2024-f79b160bc1fb

But we are fortunate to have many volunteers like Aiden and Mike who curate collections and try to brin more readers.