Steem - Get to Know the Witnesses (Part 5)

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

At this stage I feel I have gotten to know the top 20 witnesses quite well. In Part 2 and Part 3 I examined in detail their activity on Steemit and a picture begins to emerge of their interests and the topics that motivate them. In Part 4 I looked into their witness intro profiles and categorised the different talents that they bring to the job.

In this post I will revisit some of the analysis that I did for Part 2 and Part 3 to look at the witnesses outside the top 100.

I began a short series a few days ago, Steem - Get to Know the Witnesses. In this series I an analysing 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.

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Backup Witnesses

If your a top 20 witness (by vote) you get an opportunity to participate in each round of block production, the process of adding new blocks to the Steem blockchain. You also get a certain amount of influence and I imagine you will have more of a say when changes to Steem are being implemented.
Backup Witnesses are those witnesses that are outside the top 20, one is randomly selected for each round of block production but, the higher up the list you are the more frequently you will get selected to produce blocks.
On one level these witnesses have less influence and as you go outside the top 50 their influence get less and less.

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 following graphs show the number of posts/comments for the witnesses outside the top 20.

• 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.

A few witnesses stand out from the crowd for quantity of posts.

Comments

A different group of witnesses stand out for number of comments.

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 witnesses 21 - 100 into short medium and long posts/comments.

Interests

Some of the witnesses develop great apps and platforms for the Steem blockchain. As pointed out a few days ago by @richq11; witnesses such as @ausbitbank spend time developing steemviz and @jesta develops steemstats which enriches the community.

I frequently see witnesses volunteering time help people out on Steemit.chat or over on discord. There is no metric that can capture all this activity but we can get to know what witnesses write about on Steemit by looking at the tags they tag their posts with.

Extending my analysis from Part 3

What Tags do each of the witnesses outside the top 20 use?
I have divided this into two images

21-50

full size image

• Per Witness, tags in red shows lower frequency of occurrence. Brighter colours show higher frequency of occurrence.
• Witnesses with very low frequency posting may not be shown.

51-100

full size image

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I have learned a lot about the different witnesses in this series. Not everyone will be interesting in spending time to go out and research who to vote for but there is an alternative way to vote. You can vote for a proxy.

Join me tomorrow for the final post in this series where I will look at some of the more popular choices for proxy.

Previous Posts in This Series

• https://steemd.com/stats/@eroche/steem-get-to-know-the-witnesses-part-1
• https://steemd.com/stats/@eroche/steem-get-to-know-the-witnesses-part-2
• https://steemd.com/stats/@eroche/steem-get-to-know-the-witnesses-part-3
• https://steemd.com/stats/@eroche/steem-get-to-know-the-witnesses-part-4

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Thank you for reading. I write on Steemit about Blockchain, Cryptocurrency and Travel.