There does seem to have been a change in behaviour recently by the whales. I think it is down to their ability to choose on a sliding scale how many $$$s their upvote will give. This lets them give to a lot more people. The "stars" are no longer getting 4 figure sums for releasing press releases, and smaller authors with interesting things to say are getting about $100 in total. It's a step in the right direction

As an aside - how many new articles have you voted for today? I've love to see an experiment where whales and dolphins decided to spend a day voting exclusively from the "new" section, and to see what effect that has on the front page...