Before you Lose Your Stuff... Steemit is NOT "Broken"

So there were some "hairy moments" this morning as-- all of a sudden, at 8:00am US Pacific time-- suddenly all rewards on "open" posts reset to zero... and everyone's "reputation" score dropped to 25-- the default "new account" setting.

Of course, quite a few people started running around in the figurative circle, shouting "The has fallen, the sky has fallen!!"

Welcome back to the NORMAL Internet!

Well, not really. 

But I did have a moment of chuckling to myself... reminding myself how ALL OF US... might have been on Facebook, Reddit, Medium or somewhere else, where we happily would post away and get... absolutely nothing... for our efforts. Remember that? Yeah... take a moment to be grateful for this brave new world of Steemit!

But I can appreciate the anxiety. I wasn't too worried, as I like to keep up with "the news"-- not because I think myself "smart," but because I hate surprises!

We've known for a few days that the formerly controversial HF17 update had been merged with the subsequent HF18 refresh into a single release that was quite publicly scheduled to hit today at 8:00am. I actually thought it was rather awesome that the witnesses reached consensus so readily!

Now, anyone who has ever been part of a "live" software change/update has probably also experienced those "grey moments" during a changeover where everything can go a little haywire, for a short while.

Experience has taught me that such things are not worth "losing your nuts over" unless some of the quirks prove to be "sticky" and hang around for days and weeks. Then there's an actual problem.

Indeed, our reputation scores went back to their previous levels within 90 minutes.

But What About the Zero Rewards?

I'm not entirely sure of the technical aspects of the algorithms, but it does appear that some posts that were published before the changeover-- but still had time left on the 24-hour payout clock-- were reset to zero. I had one such post... but I noticed the potential payout time is now six days away. So I'm guessing it became a "new post" again, at the moment of changeover.

Now, as for the way it now seems like new posts stay near zero in rewards for a reaaallly long time, that has to do with the payout window changing from 24 hours to 7 days. It also has to do with the way the rewards pool is allocated.

There was a pretty good explanatory post from @abit earlier this morning (before things started changing!), which I would recommend reading, if you still have concerns.

My takeaway is that it will take about 30 days before the new rewards formula is going to completely "normalize" and can be counted on as the new standard. Until then, putting too much effort into "trying to figure out EXACTLY how things work" may not give you entirely accurate results.

So what do we do now??

I don't have any "formal" advice, but I plan to just keep posting, commenting and curating as I did before.

I don't think it's worth dwelling on whether rewards seem to be "accumulating slowly" or whether your upvotes suddenly don't change the rewards amount. If it's going to take 30 days for things to find a "new normal," I'm just going to put my faith in the belief that things are working as they are supposed to.

What I DON'T recommend is quitting or deciding that you want to stop posting "till things look better." Why? Because I fear you'll find yourself a week-- a couple of weeks-- maybe even a month-- down the road having created NO new content and suddenly having to play "catchup" with everyone who have been going about business as normal.

What do YOU think? Where were YOU, when things changed? Steem on!

(All text and images by the author, unless otherwise credited. This is original content, created expressly for Steemit)