I've noticed ever since the new reputation points and the new Feed page features were added, suddenly it seems almost no new posts are getting much love.

What the hell happened?

I'm not talking about my posts.

My posts typically don't get much attention anyway.
I'm talking about generally anything on the "NEW" section of the main homepage.

I've spent a lot of time in there these past couple of weeks to scope out new topics I find interesting, and which may become popular. I was accustomed to seeing a large handful of them which would be gaining momentum, but now as you scroll down, even far beyond the 30-min mark that I'm sure most of us know to aim for, I'm seeing way more zeros than I'm used to seeing.

Granted, the above example may or may not be a good example of posts which deserve to be upvoted to the moon as I haven't read them personally, but this is the over all trend I'm seeing there for any kind of post. There have been many people in http://steemit.chat, for example, who I've seen post a some really awesome content, and some of whom who are usually able to score several upvotes and comments, but suddenly it's as if the water supply has been cut off.

Was this an intentional side-effect of these new features? Is there something else at play which we don't know about yet? Are people spending all their time in the Feed page checking out only those they've followed (therefore not SEEING anything new)??
At this point, anything I might say as an answer would be pure speculation, which I won't do.
I'm just curious if anyone else has noticed this trend.