Hi, Sabrina. Michael Burg posted a piece on this earlier today - I also saw a spike in my views this morning. It was at something like 140 views/8 reads when I checked this morning. I'm now at 321/96, so that suggests a normal (for these days) 50% ratio since the overnight view splurge ended.

This also happened one day last month. But the weird thing in both cases is that it wasn't recent stories that were being entered and exited, but unknown old stories.

I had this thought which I posted in the comments on Michael's pieces:

"Maybe it's actually Medium's own systems. They have an AI detection bot crawling old stories to try to detect wrongly paywalled AI content for investigation. This would explain why it's old stuff - where the fake view won't actually affect the current earnings formula, and why, at least in my case, it just happens sporadically (one day this month, one day last for me), as it stops people in rotation, like a customs official.

But the Medium tech geniuses haven't found a way to stop that bot inspection from registering in stats as a 'view'.

It's also possible that they are inspecting comments instead/as well, and for some reason to do that they have to temporarily redefine 'comment' as 'story', as used to be the case, and the counter flags that in our current stats.

All theoretically possible. The truth is out there. Or rather, in there, in the Medium vault of secrecy."