the Bitcoin network, a consortium of miners opting to receive an upgrade called "SegWit." SegWit (short for Segregated Witness) is software that will enhance the ability of Bitcoin (BTC) to perform more efficient transactions. There are pros and cons, those who oppose the solution support different methods to achieve the same goal, namely by increasing the block size.

Is this a joke? Because I can't notice any drop in the fees. Even yesterday I paid a combined $7.50 for two small transactions. A few weeks back, it was OK. I was paying around BTC0.0001 for some of my transactions. But since then, there has been a big jump in the fee.

either your wallet is broken or you are creating huge transactions with lots of inputs that you are paying such high amount of fees. my suggestion is changing your wallet to another decent wallet or stop accepting lots of inputs and try to keep your keys free of dust.

I have been paying about 1000-2000 satoshi for the past couple of months and I get a high priority in the next block that comes. that is $0.04 fee

yeah, I usually take a look at number of unconfirmed transactions in the mempool using blockchain.info and if it is less than 5000 then I just pay 1-5 satoshi per byte for my transactions and have my confirmation in the next block.
if the number of unconfirmed transactions were more than 5000 then depending on how much I change it using my Electrum and what it suggests. but I rarely am in a rush to pay anything bigger so I either end up paying the same low amount or I don't make any transactions until mempool is back to normal.

I have seen the 21.co website give bad (very high) fee suggestions though so be careful when using it.

Segwit activation hasn't had much effect yet as very few people have a wallet with the ability to use it. We are still waiting for the most popular wallets, Bitcoin Core and Electrum to release implementations which will hopefully increase the capacity of the network.
Fees go up and down depending on the backlog of transactions in the mempool, the last month has had many periods when it was possible to get cheap transactions through and other times when it was expensive. That's just how it works.

Well it recently hit about 7% of all bitcoin transactions being of segwit format, this is significative. Consider that segwit usagei s still very limited to expert users until we have more wallets supporting it at the GUI level.

Also Roger Ver and Bitmain spam has gone low too recently.

so far I have not found out. I think the fixed fee is determined by how much priority you want. back to the initial system, if you want your transactions to take place quickly, of course you should choose a larger fee.

Larger fee = higher probability of confirmation in the next block. This is because miners obviously have reason to pick up a transaction with higher transaction fees (per kb of transaction size).

The fees have lowered for a few reasons:
1) The attack on Bitcoin network has stopped so there are fewer transactions pending.
2) Thanks to Segwit softfork, we can now have blocks bigger than 1 MB = more transactions per block
Now there's going to be another fork called Segwit2x which will increase the blocksize to 8 MB.