Yes the rewards for commenting has dropped off drastically. Think a few people got dollar signs in their eyes when the price jumped and thought they were about to become millionaires. Now that the price has come back down they are trying to milk every penny out of the system trying to achieve that income which is no longer achievable.
What they don't get is that by discouraging the smaller members less of them will make an investment into steem. If we have a 1000 new members buying steem each day the price will rise, but instead they come on and get discouraged before decided to be committed to the system. No rewards means no investment. Actually I think this is going to need to be a blog post...wonder how many whales it will piss off...hmm.
lol - I look forward to reading that one. This is a very frustrating time. I'm writing a big minnow tips post right now in hopes of helping.
I'm about to dig into this post for a few weeks. These are supposed to be the bigger good guys who support others widely. I saw it months ago and should have looked then.
https://steemit.com/steemit/@boddhisattva/top-200-effective-steemit-curators-for-the-last-week-2018-03-19-2018-03-25