Views are how many people clicked on it. "Reads" only register when someone spends the amount of time on the article Medium thinks it takes a person to read it (for this article, that would be 7 minutes or more). If I read your article in 5 minutes, it'll count as a view but not a read. "Fans" are the number of people that clapped for a story, which is a better metric than claps since each fan can clap up to 50 times. I agree that Medium's metrics aren't super intuitive, but they're not that bad once you get a hand of what they mean. Using the Medium Enhanced Statistics Chrome extension helps a lot too.