Hey David! Thanks for the response. These are good questions and something I was actually considering writing a post about in the future!

I've been writing since January 2020, so it's been about 5 months now. At this point I've published several articles on Medium, dev.to, Hacker Noon, and freeCodeCamp, and the differences are pretty interesting! Here are some things I've noticed:

Medium: Readers appear to like opinion pieces better than technical how-to articles. Engagement varies, but I get a lot more claps and highlights than actual responses.

dev.to: This site is geared towards programmers, so the more technical articles and how-to pieces seem to do better. I also get a lot more engagement in the form of comments. It feels more like a community or a forum, where Medium is more just like a place to read but not engage. dev.to also seems to attract more beginners and junior developers, so fairly basic topics get a good reception.

Hacker Noon and freeCodeCamp: The articles that seem to do the best here are lengthy deep-dive articles. I haven't received any comments on anything I've written on Hacker Noon, and freeCodeCamp doesn't have a comment section, but looking at the analytics and page views and reading time, people spend a lot of time pouring over the deep dives and tutorials.

Hope that helps! Regarding your second question on engagement, getting curated definitely makes a big difference in the number of views, but as far as actual engagement, the content type being the right fit for the platform seems to have the greatest effect as far as I can tell.