I've said I don't mind links in comments on my stories, PROVIDED the commenter has read and replied with something relevant to mine. Otherwise, they can hawk their wares on Twitter, Facebook, another blog, etc. Link-spam is just rude. You can disagree with me to your heart's content, but I know writers here who are even more adamant about this - they'll BLOCK you, write about you and shame you, and basically do what they can to blacklist you if you abuse the privilege of being ABLE to comment and include a link on their stories. Some of them will do this if you drop a link, no matter how relevant your comment. (No great loss, there, in my opinion - but only fair to warn newbies that there are a LOT of people here who feel that way.)

The number of followers is absolutely significant if you want to join or remain in the MPP and be paid for your writing at all, here. I don't think it makes much sense, personally, but Medium has decided that 100 followers is the threshold and anything below that gets you barred or suspended. It does nothing for your earnings, but it does allow you to earn AT ALL.

There are plenty of streaming feeds, here - so that part of your argument I don't understand at all. Do you never look at your home feed, or the topics and authors you supposedly chose to follow?

If someone has 10K followers and struggles to get 3-4 reads per piece, I'm going to call BS - sounds like someone who fell into the trap of BUYING their followers or playing the follow for follow game. Medium doesn't do a great job of weeding out the bots, which is unfortunate considering they set up this silly and arbitrary "100 followers" requirement.

Follow with Email? That sounds sweet, but do you know how easy it is to create a filter, send all of those emails to a folder, and forget to LOOK at them? :) You planned to, once upon a time, then you got busy... it didn't happen. But they're still there, waiting for that day when you have a few minutes. That day that despite your best intentions, rarely comes.