I feel that it will still be the same. The only difference will be instead of pursuing whales for upvotes, everybody will be pursuing everybody. They will be people with 500 account whose sole objective is to upvote, there will be people who would expect you to upvote them because they upvoted you. People would rather upvote their friends than upvote strangers... It goes on and on.

The issue with steemit remains the money factor. Remove the financial value of votes and see how calm it would become.