Definitely seeing this myself too. It's a mystery trying to piece together where the increase in payouts are coming from when steem is actually dropping in value. I would've thought there would be a correlation between the two but maybe there's a delay of some sort.

Being a minnow I also see fewer upvote sand views too. Talked to someone yesterday and they said they loved a post but couldn't upvote it because they had already used up all their steem power. I think once we figure out how to balance out our votes it'll be a lot more like what it used to be. Just need to find that sweet spot.