What you say is completely true, the big factor for knowing whether you've got peoples' attention is not just views, but of course when somebody finally hits that upvote button because that means someone actually took the time to read it and click the button to support you.
What I would say though is, followers can at least be a reasonable indicator of how much reach you have, because if you finally post something people really like the ones who have you on their feed are most likely to see it.
It may be if you have a ton of followers but no upvotes people simply haven't seen any content from you yet that they're genuinely interested in.
As long as I've been here, I sincerely hope you're wrong
lol well don't get me wrong, views and follower do account for something just like on youtube and so on, but it's no guarantee that they've actually looked at it all properly or like it enough. The same goes for when you look at view on your website and unfortunately they all turn out to be bots :(