Patience is a virtue in a developing community and more importantly, in a disruptive innovation like cryptocurrency that is complicated to adjust on our current financial knowledge.

steemit has been disruptive in monetizing content, built on rules and relations never practiced before and even these are based on newly created parameters inside the blockchain!

so being complicated and confusing is not a surprise!

I tried to read more about the new parameters which I saw everybody is talking about and seem to be vague for them and find some answers to most question we may have. here are they:

Resource Credit (RC)

RC will be used instead of Bandwidth in previous version, HF19. though I found differences in how you spend it comparing to bandwidth.

posting, commenting, editing posts (including comments), voting, flagging, resteeming, transferring tokens, even powering up will use your RC.
though browsing the others' posts won't.

So RC is measurable and manageable resource you should be cautiously spend in your activities.

Voting MANA

I found it simply like the elderly referred to as Voting Power, and I found no differences. but one question for many is the new levels they have experienced since the implementation of the HF20.

that can be because of two reasons:

1. the new system was rescaling the parameters so the MANABAR showed and still shows lower levels than your previous VP, though you haven't spend any VP.
2. It is also possible the developers wanted to lag the new system going under full load to study the consequences and finding bugs etc.

So all you need to do, is to wait for 3-4 days to see you MANA bar fully loaded again.

how many votes per day?

still 10! you can still upvote 10 posts, with your 100% mana bar power and at your full value of votes.
ofcourse it needs the patience first, as I said, to have it once back to 100%

Steemit is getting more expensive?

I believe so. RC seems to be more challenging compared to bandwidth limit and this is understandable since the number of accounts has increased significantly in 2018.
such approach will also affect the price of STEEM:

if more people try to join the system effectively, then the demand for STEEM rises and prices goes up.
if current users get sophisticated and disappointed to be able to grow their accounts, then more will opt out and the market will go bearish.

my recommendation

stay patient. every development takes time to balance and calibrate. most of things will be as usual in 3 days, and some will improve to even better with the new changes.

the steemit community is clearly expand in many directions, it obviously needs to cut some unnecessary expenses and save then for the good of the community.

I believe the quality of content will be more at the stake with new conditions, especially with new accounts rules.

Also the growth of the user numbers will be eased. but you may need more SP to be successful. so the demand for STEEM should be increased slightly too.

image sources:

• https://www.deviantart.com/artlanding/art/Luck-Potion-682732691
• https://www.deviantart.com/artlanding/art/Star-Light-682229707