As for the original purpose of the thread, what the readers mean; It just indicates how many people have added your story to their bookmarks.
Most readers on this site will binge read about once a month from what I've noticed: my new chapters average 6-800 views in the first week, then climb to 1500 over the next month or two.
The vast majority of people do not opt in for new chapter notifications, and most people's reading lists have well over 100 stories on them.
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As for what this thread devolved into; getting more readers and more consistent readers.
Writing what's popular helps, but you also need to maintain some level of quality and be consistent.
I upload both of my stories 2x a week, on the same day, at the same time. This has caused several of my readers to start reading weekly, on the second upload day, instead of monthly binging.
Consistency also helps with getting on trending, which is your fast ticket to breaking the 500 reader barrier.
As far as quality is concerned, there is some utter shit on this site. If you have popular genres, you will still get a following even with atrocious grammar and frequent spelling errors, but you will struggle to break past 100 or so readers.
Length is also important, the sweet spot is 2-3.5k words, though longer is good if you can manage it.
People say to advertise everywhere, but in the grand scheme of things, that won't help much. Your biggest windows are "New Series", "Trending", and "Newly Updated".
The absolute biggest ticket though, is to not get distracted and just do your thing.
My data and analysis comes from what I have observed with my main series as it approached 1600 readers, and my second series that is currently hovering around 400. Both of them are popular genres, (Gender Bender Isekai, with the first also being tagged as Girl's Love) but that wouldn't have mattered if I wasn't consistent and well edited.