So two days ago I logged out of my steemit account knowing I would be away for sometime as I had some pressing issues to attend to. (I have to say staying away wasn't an easy but I had to do it.)
At the time, my humble minnow account was at a value of $14+ and I was expecting an earning from a post I authored of about $8.47 to be made in 2 days. I got really busy and I couldn't get the slightest chance to post or comment on Steemit for over 36 hrs.
Finally today I got home in the evening and though I was feeling a bit exhausted, I felt compelled to log into Steemit for I'd really missed sharing with this community. So I logged in and found several notifications of new feeds and I hastely got to commenting on some of them. Soon my anxiety led me to the checkout my blog to see how much longer I had to wait for my next payout. I COULDN'T BELIEVE MY EYES (though I eventually had to), the amount on my introduction post had increased FROM $8.47 TO OVER $47 (an increase of about 5 times). I quickly checked all my other posts and comments and the case was the same, all of my earnings from curation and authoring had increased significantly.
"This must be the doing of Whales," I thought to myself. So I checked the comments on my posts for any new whales but I did not find anything there.
I decided to read new posts being created as I tried to figure out where the extra earnings were coming from. I came across a post talking about the HF-19 "Hard Fork" and that is when it dawned on me what had just happened. To encourage more engagement on the platform, Steemit had announced a hardfork that would quadruple the earnings made from authoring and curating content on the platform. I had read about it earlier but I wasn't aware of when it was going to happen.
UNBELIEVABLE! Right?
Your potential earnings multiplied by 4 or 5 times...just like that.
Well fellow minnows, welcome to Steemit...the unquestionable door to our future. Not only does Steemit allow us to create and curate content so that we promote quality, but also you get compensated for your it, and now the hard fork just quadrupled the earnings, how cool is that?
I look forward to creating, sharing and reading content on this amazing platform for the better part of my foreseeable future and I hope you do too.
Cheers to this great community and the people such as 
Power to the Stemians!