It's impossible to say really what the changes have wrought, since they got rid of the "distributed" tag. I wish they had left that. Then I could compare my distribution rate before and after changes to the algorithm.

But maybe that's exactly what they don't want us to know, for fear that we'll try to reverse engineer it and exploit the system.

I'd say it just doesn't matter as long as you are consistently producing good content.

And sometimes you get a pleasant surprise. A story I wrote in July got only a hundred or so views in the first two months. Then, suddenly, in late September it took off like a rocket, and is sitting at 11.8K views as of today.

So don't give up. Keep pumping out good stuff and eventually something is going to catch fire.