What should you know about Witness Voting

Are you interested in the bright future of this platform? Then why not choose at least one Steemit witness? Not a random one, but a well-thought-out one.

Why does it matter?

Unfortunately, not everyone understands the importance of voting for witnesses on Steemit. Perhaps because not all users know their role in the Steem economy, and maybe just do not want to understand who is who, take responsibility and make an informed choice. And what for, if the system works and money comes in time in the form of upvotes? Oh, many recently complain that original authors suffer from the lack of attention, the rates in bid-bots are not profitable, the delegation is expensive, and the Trending page is simply awful …

What do the delegates have to do with it? You know, when people complain that everything is bad in their country, I want to ask if they voted in the last elections. Did they do at least some research before drawing a cross on the blank ... or did they simply ignore the elections and stay at home? Notice, this is the only one point where the government interests your opinion! The same with Steemit.

Voting for Steemit witnesses is similar to the president, ministers or senators election (depending on what is used in your country). The only difference is that you can choose several trusted candidates (up to 30), and also that not all votes have an equal impact. The more Steem Power you have, the more you influence the position of the delegate in the list. A large number of all their voters’ SP moves a delegate to the Top-20 and makes him or her “special”, the most trusted one. See below:

Top-20 witnesses and their role

Witnesses from the Top-20 are more likely to participate in the block’s production and receive much higher rewards than other delegates who are below them (explained in the Steem White Paper). That's why many people want to get into the top. But it is also a great responsibility; they will make important decisions that subsequently affect each of us. Or did you think that the task of witnesses is simply to rent a server, run a node and sign blocks?

Consensus in Steem is not only an agreement on who and in what order will sign the blocks of transactions for adding them to the blockchain. This is also an agreement on the rules that the blockchain operates.
In an attempt to optimize the system, these rules sometimes change, and what happens is what is called a Hardfork. This requires the agreement of the top 20 Steem witnesses.

Actions and their consequences

As a result of the last - 19th - Hardfork, we got the opportunity of the Steem Power delegation, and a more fair distribution of the votes value depending on the number of SP (linear model). The delegation created the conditions for the appearance of such projects as Utopian, DTube, dMania, as well as numerous bid bots. The vote value of a simple minnow has grown 4-fold, but the number of votes that can be given in a day without a great loss of SP has decreased by the same amount. As you can see, these are significant changes in the rules of the game, which concern each user. They happened thanks to Steem developers and those who were the Top-20 witnesses a year ago.

Out of the Top-20

For today, we have 400 delegates on the list, but only about 100 of them are active. The full list together with their stats is here https://steemian.info/witnesses
Please note that some of them were stopped on the 14-16th hardfork more than a 1.5 years ago, and therefore are not active. But not everyone has uncast their votes for these witnesses.

Unvote them and give a chance to active ones.

Some witnesses have a lot of missed blocks (more than 1000), which casts doubt on their qualifications and the reliability of their nodes. But thanks to their voters, they continue to hold positions on the list. Perhaps these people are busy with other tasks that are no less important for the Steem ecosystem. In this case, you decide whether to close your eyes to their poor performance as a witness.

What’s the difference? The difference really is that the witness at the 25th position will participate in the block signing more often than the witness at the 100th position, accordingly he will receive more rewards. We should reward the best, shouldn’t we?

About Proxy

I saw many asking to set their account as a proxy to vote witnesses for you. I would say this is the highest degree of trust ... or an extreme degree of irresponsibility...It's like giving an order to a stranger to vote instead of you in the upcoming elections.
If you think it's normal to shift responsibility to someone you trust in enough, please go ahead. But if you have your own head, YOU CAN MAKE YOUR OWN CHOICE.

How to choose

The advantage of Steem-blockchain is that all information is open. You can find the witness' statistics on the link I gave above, and more information about him as a person or about his current projects - in his Steemit blog.
The main criteria must be how a witness copes with his/her main duties - running a server, signing blocks and reacting to unexpected issues. What does s/he think about current situations on Steemit, and what propositions s/he has for improving them?
Another thing to consider is what this person can offer to Steem or its community, except running a witness node. It is optional, because some witnesses just have no time for doing something else. But some of them can and do it. Just take a look around and you will find your trusted candidates.

My witness choice

@jesta. Just a mega-developer and has serious reasons to be the # 1. He is making huge efforts to improve the different parts of the Steem ecosystem. The SteemDB, SteemStats and ChainBB projects alone would be enough to vote him.
@gtg. I have a feeling that he was a delegate from the very beginning of the Steem blockchain :-) He is not very active in posting or any social projects or development of Steem-related applications, but he is doing well with the delegate's role - only 43 missed blocks in 2 years. Cool!
@good-karma. eSteem mobile App developer. It can replace Steemit for those who have no PC. Long before the appearance of Busy, Zappl, Utopian and others, he was the first to offer an alternative interface for access to the Steem blockchain.
@timcliff. One of the very few witnesses, who runs a full node. Besides, he is a community-based guy. He was taking part in organizing Steem FAQ, and now he is very active on Steem.chat #help, answering questions and helping other Steemians.
@anyx. He is “the brain” behind the Steemcleaners and Spaminators bots. His creations help detect cheaters and fight spam, plagiarism and phishing attempts, shifting a large part of the work to maintain cleanliness and safety on Steemit.
@aggroed. One of the founders of Minnowsupport, a free bot that helps minnows to get at least a minimum of 10 cents per post. When everything is sold around and only few people vote for free, it's important.
@followbtcnews. In fact, this is 2 people, also associated with the Minnowsupport Project. They are running a full public node, are responsible for the Steem.chat (run and pay for its hosting), are involved in developing, and at the same time managed to miss only 5 blocks.
@pharesim. He’s a kind whale, aiming to share his wealth with as many original Steemit authors as possible. Upvoted 10304 unique users just in the last month!!! plus running a full node. I hope he will find a way to not miss so many blocks in the future.
@curie. Who among you has not heard of @curie? A group of people trying to find and support new original and talented users, creating truly high-quality content that deserve your attention. Staying among the Top-20 witnesses can help them in this.
@busy.witness. Official witness from the Busy team. If you use Busy as an alternative to Steemit (as it is not so glitchy) and if you like what do these guys do, consider voting them as one of your witnesses.
@utopian-io. Utopian is a project that helps both developers and ordinary users to contribute to the improvement of open-sourced projects and apps. Thus they help Steem get a wider distribution around the world.
@abit. Developer and experienced witness who came to Steem from the Bitshares network, and has no connections to any bid-bots.
@patrice. A person who is running the Steemcleaners project. They are fighting to make this place clean from any spammers, plagiarists and giant farms draining our reward pool.
@ocd-witness. OCD (Operation Curation Delegation) - a group of people who support manual curation of high-quality content through their representatives in local, non-English-speaking, communities.
@qurator. The project started by @scrooger, whose goal it is to help original authors inside the community and keep the spirit of engagement and manual curation on Steemit
@ats-witness. A witness server run by @ats-david recently. I like this guy for his view of many things, such as dMania, bid-bots and our latest hardfork. He has spent quite a long time here, to understand how Steem and Steemit works, and he is ready to take responsibility to change something.
@steemgigs. The witness project and the website, created by @surpassinggoogle, whose purpose is to unite users who have something to offer to the community. You might also know him as the Untalented contest organizer.
@steemcommunity. A very new witness. It is the brainchild of two Steemit analysts and great community supporters, @abh12345 and @paulag, who delegate their time and power to reward the most effective curators and active engagers on Steemit.

18 out of the 30 possible votes for now. They were chosen not in one moment, but gradually added as I was discovering new people here. I tried to pick those witnesses who are not connected with any bid-bots. They were my not-random but well-thought choices.I know my vote is small, but as all the witnesses say, every vote counts.

Final word

Please check your witness votes. If you selected them a year ago, some may already be inactive.
But during the passed time, many other people have appeared, those who cope perfectly with a delegate’s work, and besides, they are also involved in improving Steem, developing applications, conducting public projects on Steemit, curating, helping newcomers, uniting people into communities and so on.

They deserve your vote. If you have not yet selected any single witness, check the candidates' blogs, their recent posts, comments, pay attention to those who are outside of the Top-20, and give them a chance. The system is built in such a way that without witnesses and their healthy competition, it will be dead system. That's why everyone should participate.

Make a wise choice or do not complain that everything is bad around Steemit!

If you do not have the power to change anything, support those who can do it.

Thank you for your time, votes and comments! I appreciate them.
This post was very long to make it bilingual, so the Russian version of it will be published a little later.

Images: Pixabay (CC0)
English proofreading: Steemit Creators Guild - https://discord.gg/MRFFtPq