While I was surfing thru Steem reading post and looking thru my stats at steemstats.com, I realized that the next payment cycle for my post which already went thru 1 payment cycle is a month away (22 to 29 days away). Big kudos to @jesta for implementing this awesome tool to track stats of your post and activity.
Here's snapshot of my blog stats below.
This is due to a host of changes that been introduced in Steem version 0.12.0..
The developer change the new payout period from 24 hours to 12 hours for the 1st payment cycle. And for the secondary rewards, after the first cycle, if the post accumulate new votes for the next 30 days. At the end of this 30 days, the last payout is made. No subsequent payout after. Any upvotes after the secondary payout doesn't have any impact to the post anymore. This change been introduced to allow contents to rotate faster in trending section.
This is not only the change. New version introduced feature that prevent replies after the second payout on a discussion. The discussion will be locked and users (or bots) can't post any comments. Not only that, editing post after 1st payout also disabled. User can't edit the post to bump the post up after the first payout. With that saying, amendments to post will be available in future features via custom operations. Custom operations allows user to still engage on discussion but will not have any effect on distribution in rewards.
Another big changes that been introduced in new version is posting reward limiting. Each account can only post up to 4 top-level posts per day. If more than 4 posts been posted in a day, the algorithm will start penalize the rewards that been earned on additional post. But the limit is not for comments. My take is this feature been introduced to deter spammers and give chance to other user's post to earn. Owh yea, if people try to bypass this by using multiple accounts, their post will not be seen by most users.
Another changes in new Steem is introduced to prevent sybil attacks. There will be a limit in number of people they can and will follow as user's feed are generated by the people they follow and most users discover contents from their feed.
In new Steem, they removed liquidity rewards when your trade in their marketplace as it doesn't achieve the expected effect. It doesn't really affect me as I don't trade on marketplace.
From the comment section of the announcement, I can see a lot of users are happy with changes they brings in. It's definitely an improvement. Hope more improvements will come into Steem!