I have used it for about 6 weeks and from what I can tell, the interface looks a little bit smoother, post payout is 14 days so can be rewarded for longer and seems to be less/no bots in there (more real people/users).
On the other side of the coin as I try to give a balanced view...
You can appear in "trending" with one vote (I've seen posts with 1 vote and 500+ WLS) which shows to me it can still be manipulated. People can buy big upvotes (no different to voting bots on steemit) although it is argued that the whale accounts all manually review content. You need to know how bitshares works so you can use the various tokens that can be won from contests on the platform.
Hope that helps
RE: Whaleshares - can anyone explain it in SIMPLE terms?