Thanks for your comment!
I think you're right, except "hot" and "trending" are based on Steem earnings, not views. And the "20 questions" post with 1,700 views did OK ($22 value), but it wasn't near the top of the trending page. I feel very strongly that most of the traffic for that post came from an outside source. Most of my other posts have more upvotes than views (which, as I mentioned above, is odd). This was an exception, which makes me think the traffic wasn't coming from Steemit users.