We call this process dusting.
There used to be (still is? dun know) a service that would stop this from happening by bumping up a low payout comment to a higher level so it wouldn't get dusted. Not sure if that's still around... don't care because it doesn't apply to me.
I'm one of the few people out there that still upvotes comments (due to the convergent curve sucking away half the payout value) and I haven't checked in a very long time whether this was happening to me or not. Apparently it is.
I can't remember the exact number, but if the comment is paying out less than a certain amount (somewhere between 1 and 2 cents) the network dusts it and rounds that to zero.
Took me a while but I found this outlier payout from 
I'm pretty sure that the network determines the cutoff using our relative value to USD (HBD) rather than the raw payout measured in HIVE. This means that if Hive goes x10 a lot less comments would get dusted because their dollar value would be higher. This is interesting because the witness set this price themselves using their nodes via the price feed.
Technically they could set the value to whatever they wanted, but normally it stays very close to the actual price by pinging the centralized exchange servers like Binance to relay that information to the blockchain. We trust the witnesses to be oracles of the network and feed correct information to the chain.
From a certain perspective, dusting is an attack against poor people. We are taking away their reward and dumping it back into the reward pool to be acquired by someone else. On the other hand, the process of dusting also makes the network more efficient.
Imagine witnesses (every node actually) being forced to calculate thousands of comments with thousands of votes and curation for thousands of plankton, and then when everything was said and done the total sum of all those operations was less than a penny. Not worth. By simply ignoring payouts like that we ignore a lot of hassle and make the network run more smoothly and quickly.
I have no idea why 4 of my comments in a row happened to get dusted. I'm normally very careful about upvoting for at least 2 cents. At the same time, the price of Hive has been going down lately, so over 7 days that 2 cent upvote could have dipped significantly (although probably not by 50%). There's also the possibility that more money than expected was leeched from the reward pool, which would have pushed the payout down even further. If I want to make sure I never get dusted I'll probably have to upvote for at least 3 cents going forward. Although chancing it isn't that big of a deal either. We are talking about pennies, after all.
I just took the day off today to continue working on my Hive database.
Feels good.
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Notice anything? Most blocks don't even have posts/comments in them. They are mostly upvotes, transfers, and "SteemMonsters" custom JSON operations. I think it's slightly comical that Splinterlands is still called Steemmonsters in the code on the HIVE blockchain. Should give you some kind of idea about how hard it is to change certain things once you've committed to them.
It's really great to see that Splinterlands is filling up the blockchain because we have the ability to scale far better than most blockchains out there, but we simply don't have the development to back it up. In my next post I'll explain this a bit more. Failing to fail is failure.