While I think it's great that a bunch of whales have voted on this, that does seem like kind of a cheap tactic to keep people around who are thinking of leaving. I've seen them do that with a bunch of similar posts. Surely a better way to do that would have been to vote on the content he really put effort into? There are a lot of people who are very active in the community, producing quality content on the regular and getting completely overlooked. I think the whales could step up their curation game a bit in an effort to make people really want to stay and keep contributing rather than trying to catch them as they're walking out the door.