I always knew there was no reward in the reading time of a short form itself and have generally only used them as responses to other peoples stories that I wanted to promote and/or to promote / breathe new life into older stories. Your painstaking research including emails with the useless desk was very helpful to understanding the algorithm so I can properly use it for these purposes going forward. The stats and math I showed in the story of the money earned on the older story that I back linked to shows that it does work for these purposes. As an aside, I found an older short form of mine that I had been searching for that I wanted to share with you. It actually was not metered (I don't think) because I did it as a response as story (are you aware of that feature?) so it may or may not count in your technical definition of not triggering the "read more" on the profile, but anyway is within the 150 and bolded first sentence rules and I have always been very proud of what I managed to cram into the 150. In addition to having an auto-created box link to the person's story to which I was responding, I worked in about a dozen inline links to stories of mine and others. https://medium.com/illumination/yes-you-are-the-rare-writer-i-have-seen-on-medium-make-this-important-distinction-between-happy-b703631e2647