The best explanation I've seen about the impact of HF19 is this one by @personz: Here's Why Your Potential Payouts Are Going Down. After HF18, the reward pool was empty and had to refill over more than a month's time. With HF19, there was a sudden drain of the pool and now it has to restabilize at some unknown level. Then things should stabilize.

And with the upvotes, I think there are 2 things going on. One, with all the new people and all the resteeming, my own feed has become unworkable. I don't see all the people that I have followed regularly for months. Now I am using a handwritten list -- how untechnological is that!

The other is that some of us, at least, have struggled to have an effective voting strategy. @merej99 wrote a good post about that recently. Once we get our percentages figured out and voting power built up again, I think we will see a lot more votes. And even those smaller votes will be worth more than they were before HF19.