Trending page as of now, post rewards of over $100 continue down below.
A quick summary of how Hive rewards work:
The feed price is determined by the witnesses and the median in the last 3.5 days is taken by the blockchain, most witnesses (both consensus and backup, however, the median of the consensus witnesses are the main deciding factor.) usually update their feed prices on an hourly basis. Feed price is basically for how much USD HIVE is trading for at the time. For example, as of writing, this post 1 HIVE is approx 0.75 USD -- which would mean the witnesses would submit their price feeds as $0.75 -- effectively changing the blockchain's feed price in the next couple of days.
What does feed price mean?
Feed price is essentially how much HIVE is worth according to the blockchain. Feed price also decides on how much an upvote is worth to how much a post is paying out. If the feed price is higher, a post may get $100 in upvotes, after curation split, that would be %50 going to the author. $50 is then split into two, $25 as HBD and $25 as HP. This is also the reason why most people saw a decrease in the amount of HP they were getting from post rewards, as HIVE's value increases, posts start paying out more in HBD and less in Hive Power.
"I am being downvoted like crazy!"
As you may or may not have realised in the last couple of weeks, a lot of posts are being downvoted. This isn't necessarily because they are doing something bad. Bots or autovotes set up when feed price was at about $0.1 USD, contributed to the post's rewards in a manner where a single line post with an image can receive upvotes of over $150 -- yes, 150 USD for sharing a photo of anything and writing a single sentence. If that sounds crazy for you, you are right, because it is. It is possible to observe stakeholders using their stakes to downvote some posts, not necessarily "zeroing them out" in a sense where the post does not pay out any rewards, but lower the number of USD rewards to a sensible point for the "content" written in that post.
Just wanted to share my two cents for people I have been observing in the last couple of weeks complaining about the downvotes they are receiving, or people who are surprised about the hundreds of USDs worth of upvotes they suddenly got.