When Ned and Dan created this existing system, they wanted to make sure that everyone didn't just vote for themselves all the time. This would be a very boring and anti-social system if most people just voted on their own stuff and no one else's. This is why they set the power curve to be N^2 instead of N.
HF 19 is changing N^2 back to N, so there will be less reason to vote on other people and more reason to vote on yourself. Now, well people's behavior really change because of this? Probably not so much and probably not at first anyways, but I'm willing to bet that this selfish behavior will become at least a little bit more common in the future.
I hope all is well after this hardfork. I like what we have going on now. Steem On!