What Happened on Medium? Many Views, But Few Reads

Yesterday an extremely strange phenomenon happened on Medium, the number of views simply exploded while the number of reads was comparable to the previous days.
I initially thought that it was a completely isolated case what happened to me, but I read a few hours ago an article of a friend who had the same problem

If these views had been driven by a single article I would have thought that one of the articles made it to the top of Google and people because they are not Medium members can’t read it. That would have been one explanation for the high number of views and low number of reads.
But the fact that it is happening to more people, some of them even having the link for those who are non-Medium member makes me think that this is not the problem.

So I tried to do a short research I noticed that it is not a sure article but on the last articles I have an increase of 14–18 views from non-Medium member with 0 reads which makes me think it is an attack from malicious people or bots aimed to decrease read ratio.

What they don’t realize is that read ratio refers to Medium members only, but I…