Adam, what do you mean? Your views are better or worse when a story is locked? You see, I see Mateja’s point — I’m not a fan of the system, I agree it attracts people for the wrong reasons, and on the top of it, most people won’t earn much anyway. BUT I tried both locking and not locking and here are my observations:

• (Side observation:) It’s nice to earn a dime from your writing, especially if you write poetry. Last month I got almost 30 bucks and although I’m lucky enough that 30 bucks don’t make any difference for my quality of life, it’s amazing to receive it solely for writing poetry. POETRY!
• Reads and claps depend on the quality of your writing obviously but the quality doesn’t matter if you have no views in the first place. And what I observed was that my views were significantly lower for the unlocked articles. (And I’m comparing poems only, to make the comparison fairer.) The views were better if a story (locked or unlocked, it didn’t matter) was in a publication enjoying a bunch of dedicated fans (such as Chalkboard) but if we’re looking solely at the poems published in my own collection 365 Days Of Poetry or directly from my profile — the ones that were unlocked received significantly fewer views. (Now all of them are moved to 365 Days and locked — but I couldn’t do it for some time as I was travelling and writing on the app which doesn’t allow to lock or add to publications, weirdly.)

So — these are my reasons and I’m very curious how locking/unlocking affects your views? cheers, Gosia