Thank you for doing this! I wrote privately to Medium in late-summer 2019 to ask them to stop paying by claps and start paying by real metrics like reads instead, because I noticed that lots of people were reading my stuff but apparently too self-conscious to clap (I write a lot about mental health and relationships)... whereas I got fewer reads but more claps on "safe" subjects... and lo and behold, within weeks, clapping was no longer the pay metric, and read time was! I'm still psyched about this.

So, moral of the story: they definitely listen. ;)