I have been making this point for a few days now. Users are trying to preemptively vote on content that they think will trend, based on previous trending topics and authors, regardless of the content and quality. And who drives this kind of voting on these posts? The whales.

They're incentivizing herd mentality and reward seeking - not finding and rewarding actual valuable content and contributors. (And I fully understand subjective value, but we're talking about reward-based behavior without any associated risk. Value is pretty much a non-factor here - only finding the trendy categories and authors that the whales are likely to upvote is what seems to influence voting right now.)

And there doesn't appear to be a large volume of people wanting to change this...because they're still hoping for their own big pay days to begin - or to continue.