John, I believe it's the same thing. Medium recently renamed curation to "chosen for further distribution." They're also keeping it more behind the scenes and you won't get an email notification or alerted to what topics you were distributed in. If you are seeing "chosen for further distribution" on your stories, then they have been curated. (Or distributed as they call it now.)

As for getting more views, it doesn't seem to always work that way for me. Some of my distributed articles do great, and some barely get any views.