Hello Steemian and yikers where have all the rewards gone!?
As I logged into the trending page 2 days ago I was completely shocked to see the highest rewarded post at just over $10

abpf87.com

Wow something must be wrong, I probably just need to refresh the page I thought.
But no after refreshing thinking I must be on the wrong page I doubled checked to make sure I was definitely on the trending page.
Confirming myself I started to scroll further down and wow....

So many posts barely reaching the $1 mark!?

And then I thought, Oh my! What of my own posts?

healthyhomeopathy.com

I checked mine and I also only had a few cents, ok well like $0.01...

And oh my.. it didn't end there..what the heck look at that my reputation score!
Its at 25 again!!?

Yup strange tides on steemit indeed.

Well atleast as for the 25 reputation level that many of us had the joy of experiencing it seems like its something to expect after some hardfork updates.
As this update 18 is its not the only time users have had this happen to them.
But dont worry guys it seems its just a regular bug that we should now expect every so often from hardforks.
But now you should all have your reputation standing as it was before the changes of hardfork 18.

Well I guess the madness was obvious wasn't it?
Hardfork 18 really is here, or is it really hardfork 17?...hmmm
alt
Make it 17/18? Cool yup...

Well regardless we are expected to now have both posting and curation rewards to drop ALOT since this hardfork 18.
Now that we have been updated expect these first days of hardfork 18 to reward out only about a %1 to %3 of the what was the pre-hardfork level.
By today it should already be higher, I myself have already noticed the difference.

There are basically 2 ideas on how this works

https://static.wixstatic.com/media/0fea7d_ac3b5999e94e4d6c9f155f89207815bc_{mv2_d_2121_1414_s_2.jpg/v1/fill/w_419,h_279/0fea7d_ac3b5999e94e4d6c9f155f89207815bc}mv2_d_2121_1414_s_2.jpg
static.wixstatic.com

1-
Firstly we can expect gradual reward pool increases daily, the readings are probable that the rewards will increase at 25% per week regardless of what we do, until the stasis of course is once again reached.
So yes divide it up and in other words we would indeed be looking at about %3 per day.

2-
Or secondly is that the increases will be dependent on on us.. meaning if we arent voting and posting enough due to many thinking there is no point as the pay is so low we could be doing more harm.
Well not so much harm but slowing down the recovery pace to %1 as we must vote and post past the given daily percent so that on the following day the pool refills quicker for the next.
We are stressing the pool so it can figure out what the average amount of water will be to sustain us.
Basically we may need to help fill the pool first.

walkerpoolandspas.net

So the first way seems simpler and more likely but whether they are tied together or not I dont know but what I do know is it seems regardless its still important that we continue to vote and create content because as the pool gets filled over the coming days we should get a percent of the votes weight effect from the posts reward at a later date.

Some will hold back on their best content and thats understandable as in general we are to get slightly less rewards but more on all that later.

Part One

I will write more on all this soon in part 2.
Also I dont claim to fully understand whats going on perhaps someone with more knowledge can help you.