Holy crap, have you seen the amount of payouts on today's front page?
The top post is at a whopping $32,209 at the time of writing, with several more posts that earned over $6000. In my experience front-page posts would usually get about $1000-$2000 in the past.
I've noticed a sharp jump in the value of my own votes too, my vote was worth only a cent or so yesterday, but now it bestows 0.17$ upon whomever I vote for.
Is there an explanation for this sudden jump in value? A change in the payout algorithm? More users on the platform? The moving average of the Steem price finally adapting to current exchange rates?
My theory is there might be a connection with the site maintenance that was performed. Steemit was in read-only mode for several hours.
The value of posts seemed to keep increasing even while Steemit was in read-only maintenance mode. People were not able to vote, yet the payout increased.
So perhaps during site maintenance when no new posts are made, all of the "payment pool" will keep going towards existing posts?
Anyone have a better explanation? Looking forward to your thoughts.
Also, congrats to anyone who just got "rained" on!