Witness Proxies Interfere With SPS Voting

I'm pretty sure many people had no idea witness proxies are the ones who decide when it comes to SPS votes. I know it seems illogical -- What do witness proxies have to do with the Steem Proposal System, right? -- but that's how it works.

I mentioned it before, more than once, and I said that it is not a good solution to mix witness proxies with what is desired to be proxies for SPS, meaning separate groups.

The chosen solution most likely use witness proxies instead of separating them into two distinct type of proxies for a few reasons:

• it was the easier path, they were already set up, no extra coding work was necessary to add an additional type of proxy for SPS
• it took time for the witness proxied stakes to build up, and using them assured much more stake will consistently vote, instead of motivating individual active accounts to vote every time a great proposal arose (and that always excluded inactive accounts)
• as it is proven from practice, setting a proxy is not something you recommend someone to do and the next time they become active (if they do), they'll jump at doing, because most people can do without it (and without voting for witnesses or proposals), so they'll choose to ignore it and move on.

Given the above reasons, and although I remember I remarked this issue before HF21, but a little too late to make extensive changes to the code desirable, so given that fact I believe we'll have to put up with using witness proxies for SPS, at least for a while.

But I also believe we need two types of proxies in the future, because you might want to proxy your witness votes to someone and your SPS votes to someone else. Which makes perfect sense, because they are completely different things, and they refer to distinct funding from the inflation that can be accessed.

That being said, I don't think you should reset your witness proxy, if you have one set, to be able to vote for the Steem Proposal of your choice. Because that means your witness votes are also in the air and you need to handle them manually going forward, which is what you were trying to avoid by setting a witness proxy.

What you need to do is mention to your witness proxy which Steem proposal you'd like to be voted by him/her, and politely ask them to do it.

If they don't want to, and don't give you good reasons for it, you can choose another witness proxy who does both jobs according to your liking: you trust him or her to approve the right witnesses (you can always check what witnesses he or she voted for from steemd.com/@username, where username is the potential witness proxy username; you can see the witness votes at the bottom of the left column) and votes for the Steem Proposals you want or you trust him or her to vote for the right proposals as well.

A witness proxy has much more power now with the new ability to vote for proposals instead of the SP holders who proxied their votes.

That's why you should be careful who you proxy your votes too. It doesn't have to be a popular actor really, not all of them do what's best for you, or they have interests they play or votes they trade.

If you can and want to do both tasks yourself, voting for witnesses (and updating these votes every once in a while), and voting for what you think are the proposals that deserve funding, than you should do them yourself.

If you are not a very active steemian, the second task may not be for you, because voting for Steem proposals is and will be much more dynamic than voting for witnesses.

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Here's how you check if you voted for a Steem Proposal and your witness proxy hasn't.

Go to steemworld.com/proposals and check out a proposal you voted for.

Look for your account in the list.

If the row with your account is struck through it means your vote is not counted, because while you voted for the proposal, your witness proxy did not, and the one which matters is the vote of the witness proxy.

If the numbers are between parenthesis, it means both you and your witness proxy voted for the proposal. Your vote wasn't really necessary, but at the same time, if the witness proxy decides to unvote the proposal, there's nothing you can do about it, other than change the witness proxy or reset it completely. I already talked above about the two options.