Tutorial: How to Vote for Steem Witnesses

One of the things that baffled me when I first came into Steemit was the presence of Witnesses. A few weeks in the platform, I read a post about a certain witness who created a bot to downvote posts of another Steemit user because the latter was an a**hole. I then thought that maybe witnesses were the "keeper of peace" ??? (LOL)

Then I met surpassinggoogle. He was kind to leave an encouraging comment on one of my early posts and even gave me an upvote. He got my attention by giving attention to my post that nobody really cared about. So I took a peek into his account and was astounded to see all these people rooting for him. I asked my partner, steemitph if he knew who surpassinggoogle was and why he has so many supporters, he answered "He's a witness". I then thought that Witnesses were the popular guys in Steemit (another LOL).

It really is quite embarrasing to tell you all of these now when after some research, I found out what a Steem Witness really is. I've actually befriended one and asked him some questions about his work as a witness. @precise started Ask Me Anything or AMA sessions last month to " inculcate interactive learning in the community" and it was in one of these sessions where I finally understood (to some extent. haha!) what a Steem Witness really does and how important they are in the blockchain. He holds these weekly sessions for free and if you're interested to join, please refer to his post here.

From what I've learned, A witness runs a server node. These nodes are the "backbone" of the Steem blockchain because of the blocks they produce. Steem witnesses maintain these nodes because if nobody maintains them or if they are poorly maintained, the blockchain crashes. So it is important to choose your witness because although it is fairly "easy" (that's the word precise used) to set up a witness node, it takes hard work and dedication to maintain those.

You can vote up to 30 Steem Witnesses. So far, I've voted for 7; arcange, ausbitbank, curie, good-karma, cloh76.witness, steemgigs, and precise. My decision in casting these votes is based on a number of reasons. There is already great value in running a node 24/7, but the activity of the witness in the Steemit platform is what creates the connection between a witness and its voters. The witnesses on my list are people who I found to have added extra value to the Steemit platform. I have yet to complete that list and it will take some time for me to cast all 30 votes because that's just how I am. I take my time in things like this but I did get to read up on another witness, who I voted for today. Below is a video of how I did that and if you already have some people in mind that you wish to vote now, you can follow the steps below on how you can cast those votes too!

Transcript of the video

Hey everyone! I'll be adding another name to my list of voted witnesses today and I'm gonna show you how I do it. So I'm now logged in to my Steemit account, I'm on my blog page. Now I need to go to the Witness Voting page in order to cast that vote so I go there using this burger menu over here. It's the one sitting next to the profile picture thumbnail. So click on that and I'm given a menu of choices, of course I choose Vote for Witnesses, which is the 7th choice on the list. And I'm now on the Witness Voting page. This page will tell you how many votes you have remaining. I've already, I already have my 7 witnesses so I have 23 votes to go. Now it will provide you a list of the top 50 witnesses as of today and if you do not find the name of the witness you wish to vote for on the list, you just need to enter their name here. Now since I'm voting for teamsteem, who's on the top 50, he's right here, I just need to click on this symbol here. It says vote. So I click on that and the system prompts me for my active key, I provide that and I sign in. And I'm led back to the Witness Voting page. As you can see, my vote for teamsteem has been accounted for. I only have 22 votes remaining. Alright, so that's how you vote for your witnesses, thank you for watching this video and I hope this helps.

I do hope you find the time to get to know the Steem Witnesses and vote for the ones you deem worthy.