It has been over two years now that I have been on the STEEM blockchain. One of the first and wisest things I did when I got started here was to create an account on Discord.
Probably the second smartest thing I did once I had a Discord account was to setup Ginabot. As part of the Minnow-Power server, Ginabot has been in invaluable tool in getting alerts about things that are happening with my account.
Someone resteemed one of my posts... boom, I get an alert! Someone upvoted my post or followed me... boom, I get an alert. Someone downvoted me... boom, you guessed it, I get an alert.
Like all programs, Gina goes down sometimes, but she always catches back up and even though I have the 
It used to be that Gina was sending me alerts all day, every day. Most of them went something like: "Your Author Award Just Arrived" or "Your Curation Reward Just Arrived". It used to be that I would get a pretty fair mix of those alerts through the day.
Lately, or more specifically after the latest hardfork I have noticed that it is far more rare to get the "Author Reward" alerts. The fact is, since the recent changes to the reward structure, far fewer people are voting on comments.
I always struggled with keeping my Voting Power up when I was actively upvoting comments. It was always a delicate dance between having enough VP to upvote the content I enjoyed while still being able to upvote those who took the time to comment on my posts.
I will be honest, since the hardfork, it is pretty rare that I throw out a comment upvote anymore. Even with my 
The idea was that with the improved rewards on curation, most comment votes would be relatively dust unless they were more than a certain dollar (cents) amount. I don't remember the exact number off the top of my head, but for the majority of us, it wasn't worth it.
As someone who is a pretty active at commenting and who used to see Gina virtually blowup all through the day with "Author Rewards", I can't say as though I am seeing the benefit. I have spent a good deal of time adjusting and tweaking my manual and auto votes to maximize my curation income, but I don't think it comes close to what I was making on a weekly basis via comment rewards.
What about you readers? Have you noticed the same thing? Is this just the reality of Steem these days? I know that some people have started Steem-Engine tokens to reward comments via something besides STEEM, but do you feel it still holds as much value as those "Author Rewards" you used to receive? Let me know what you think in the comments!
