I wonder if some of it has to do with minnows being discouraged with the falling post values. I assume a lot of that is from the falling Steem price but I'm not really savvy about it. I do know that I was sooooo excited to see my highest potential payout ever the other day (almost $170) and that's now dropped like a stone to around 100 with three days of potential decline to go lol.
I've been voting and I'm on both of the minnow support curation trails as well, I agree we need to stay engaged, but for someone with usual payouts in the single digits, losing $70 can be disheartening. Just spitballing that others may be dropping their participation for that reason ☹️
Yup, I have seen the same thing. Posts that were going to pay me around $50, suddenly dropped to $25. How demoralizing.
If you buy a sandwich, eat and like it, the person who make that sandwich shouldn't have money taken from them days later, just because you decided to buy a sandwich at another store.
Once you make a purchase (up-vote), you should "own it" and the amount paid out to the author should never go down.