I believe that the whales decided to transform the meaning of the platform and direct it towards the curators and the workers on request.
None of these care about the value of the steem (unless it is $ 0.00) because they exchange content NOT cryptocurrency.
The decrease in the contribution of the upvotes is a kind of tax that does NOT go to the curators directly, because it goes through that rare payment algorithm that they have invented as an alibi.

PD. Institutional censorship and self-censorship is one of the goals of HF21