You just described what I was thinking @liberosist . To be honest, the change of linear rewards and 4x voting power is not that efficient. For sure its the beginning and everyone seems to be enjoying their "high worth of vote" but it opened the room for selfish actions. I'm sure this happiness gonna end soon and people will start complaining what is going on. The happiness is mainly due to increase in pending rewards because of HF 19 update in my view.
I am more in favor of "Quadratic Reward Curve". This linear change is not creating enough "equality" in my honest opinion. The only difference is that, our vote is now worth more than before. You'll see mostly those people trending well who have huge SP (and who could vote first for themselves for $300 or something) then some whale bots will come and up-vote after 10-20 minutes and hurray, they cross 1,000$ in matter of an hour . How fair it is!
Anyways, these are my thoughts. I wish this update could reset to previous one which was far more attractive. You had chance that a whale will come and vote then your post will fly. Right now you need 5-6 whales to vote on 100% voting power which is unlikely for anyone to expect (except as a surprise)
You'll see number of views is decreased therefore, the number of votes are decreased. Intention behind this update might be great but honestly from the way it looks like currently, it's not working that well. And man believe me, it could really harm the community. It also opened the room for circle-jerk.