I never saw that, at least until the recent round of posts started being made about shifting things around. I read the white paper, web site, bitcointalk posts, and no I never saw it. People who were encouraged to participate on the basis of rewards being displayed on the site in response to their actions were always told that the rewards would change based on activity (being divided among more posts for example) but I do not recall any suggestion that the rules governing those reward would be retroactively rewritten in a substantial way until quite recently. In fact, if I recall correctly, some earlier changes and proposals were specifically put forward as only applying to future actions.