Steem - Get to Know the Witnesses (Part 2)
Witnesses secure the Steem Blockchain. It's an important role and each and every account holder gets 30 Witness Votes. These votes elect the Witnesses that get trusted with the job.
Image pixabay.com
I began a short series yesterday Steem - Get to Know the Witnesses, over the next few days I will perform analysis on the digital footprint of the witnesses to get to know them a bit better and help inform my witness vote. I welcome discussion during this series and I hope it raises awareness of who we are electing to manage the Steem Blockchain.
There may be different philosophical reasons in the community for choosing witnesses and this analysis (and my choices) are not intended to judge right or wrong but I wish to inform the community what the different witnesses have written about, what they stand for and how active they are in the community.
Furthermore this discussion is not intended to be technical in nature but will instead look at some Graphics and Stats to help us get to know our witnesses, especially the top 20.
Top 20
The top 20 witnesses play a special role for the Steem Blockchain.
As witnesses get voted (with witness votes) from other members of the community they get a rank based on the combined SP of the accounts that voted for them. The top 20 witnesses by rank get to verify transactions and create new blocks on the Steem blockchain.
One backup witness (outside the top 20) is also chosen but the the top 20 get to participate in each round of block production
Communication
We talked yesterday about how witnesses have a special role in Steem. They are the gatekeepers. They run the software that defines how the Steem Blockchain operates, the software that defines the rules of the Blockchain. When you hear of hardforks, this means there has been a change to the rules and the witnesses have updated the code they are running to create the Blockchain.
To the extent that Witnesses are elected to represent the people (other Steemians) there needs to be some level of communication between Witnesses and the community. Not all Witnesses need to be active communicators, but as discussed yesterday, a mix of talents in the pool of Witnesses may benefit the community.
What does witness communication and engagement with the community look like for the top 20 witnesses?
Posts (Ex Comments)
Witnesses communicate with each other on private chats, debate topics of interest and proposed changes. It's not possible to analyse all of this activity but we can look at the number of posts and comments that Witnesses have made on Steemit. This gives an indication of their engagement with the wider community.
- The size represents the length of the posts by the witnesses
- The colour represents the mean date of the posts; dark blue is older, light blue is newer.
We can see @netuoso is light blue which means his posts are newer. He joined the platform in mid 2017, most of the other authors joined in early to mid 2016 and some have not posted much recently which means they get a darker colour.
Comments
The picture for Comments looks a little different.
- The size represents the length of the comments by the witnesses
- The colour represents the mean date of the comments; dark blue is older, light blue is newer.
Quality of Engagement
Quantity does not equate to quality however, in the witnesses case they generally do put a lot of effort and thought into their interactions here on Steemit.
The following graphs classify each comment and post of the top 20 witnesses into short medium and long posts/comments.
Number of Posts (ex comments)
Number of Comments
Thanks for reading, join me again tomorrow as I continue my analysis...
Previous posts in this series:
Thank you for reading this. I write on Steemit about Blockchain, Cryptocurrency and Travel.
This is a good submission, but most newbies and minnows don't vote for a witness. Although the more powerful the account, the more weight your vote carries. Yet minnows still need to start voting.
A good job you're doing here.
How do we vote for and engage with the witnesses?
If you click on the three bars in the upper right hand corner a drop-down will appear with a "Vote for Witnesses" option. To the left of the names is a box you can click.
I am very glad you are talking about this @eroche because I really had no idea what is witness and what it do. I believe your voice is likely to be heard. I know others have talked about this in the past, but I don't see this being taken as seriously as I would like it to be.
Please keep it up :)
After this analysis, you did a great job. Very useful information. It really helps to get to know the witnesses a lot better. When I made my choice, I had to search for at least some information about each candidate from the list. For me it was very difficult. I still have free votes for that, and now, based on your conclusions, I will be able to examine other candidates in even more detail. Thanks @eroche
This is a very cool analysis, thank you! I have a document where I regularly add ideas for things I want to blog on and one of the entries is to analyze witness posting and commenting. This is something I think is important for this position. You did a much better job than I would have breaking it down. :)
I think as time goes on, witnesses will start to expand their skill sets by either growing themselves or hiring others. For strong communicators, they will hire C++ programmers and/or entrepreneurs. For strong technical witnesses who don’t communicate much, I think they will hire marketing teams to explain what they are up to. I think it’s just going to get better and better.
Thanks for putting this together so I can just resteem it instead of dong it myself. :)
Thanks for the contribution and the resteem @lukestokes.
Very interesting perspective.
I am still working through my picks for witnesses, I will also analyse:
In particular are there any witnesses that have received a lot of unvotes?
If there are any additional things you think would be interesting to examine to help inform someone's vote please let me know and I will do my best to capture it in a picture.
I got a great idea from @richq11 to include information about what projects that witnesses are working on. I will also analyse that if I can get enough data from somewhere. It may be harder to cover comprehensively.
I'm not certain how the length of posts is relevant, or how many for that matter. Some of the witnesses perform other valuable services such as develop related platforms such as @ausbitbank with steemviz or @jesta with steemstats as well as being involved with others.
Take for your comment @richq11. That would be valuable info to have to hand for each of the top witnesses. I'll try to compile a list of the major Steem related projects that they are working on.
I admit, this is more detailed than my article on this. I suggest you edit your tags and add #witness-category so as to get witnesses to view this awesome piece
@eurogee of @euronation community
Nice thanks for the tip.
Out of my 30 votes, I have only voted on 2 witnesses so far. This post is a good reference for my upcoming votes. Thanks a lot.
Very Very Amazing post sir @upvoted :):)
Thanks dear discussion this matter .I alwys see your post and follow you.
Wow, this kind of post is really important to showcase the importance of Witness System to newbies and others who don't know, and yes we are getting hassle free transactions due to this only, so we have to understand it deeply because at last we all are dealing with human beings and the state of interaction, action, intention and opinion can change so it's really important to be updated in the field of Witnesses and we all should use our votes to make our Blockchain more strengthen. So thanks for the arrangement of effective session of discussion. Thanks for sharing this post with us and keepup the great work.
Stay Blessed.
Thanks @chireerocks
Welcome. 🙂
I have only been here for 30 days so i am still getting a feel for who i think is good or not, It seems like everyone that is a witness is good so far.