I suppose that one possible response is that whales have an incentive to preserve the value of their investments, and the best way to do that is to promote a system of fair voting and promote the integrity of the system

The one-size-fits-all ranking system (c.f. my other reply to smooth below) makes it impossible for whales to act rationally, because they can't compute a set of votes which would reflect their individual preferences for quality which might be shared with other like-minded users.

Thus as far as I can see, the system disincentivizes the whales from participating in voting, for they will come to see that either they become one dysfunctional groupthink monolith or they more or less effectively nullify each others votes in terms of anything other than a uniform ranking which is functionally equivalent to no ranking.