The Witness Voting Engagement Report - 2017-08-08
8 Days ago I posted about how only 7.5% of active Steemit accounts are voting for Steemit witnesses. Since this is an important topic, I plan to do a regular weekly report on account voter engagement.
I'm using a new primary metric for this report as I think those with real value in Steem should have the most incentive to vote to secure it. From that perspective, I'm looking at accounts with more than 100,000 VESTS which gives us a current engagement rate of:
19.9%
If you're not sure what a witness vote is, or why it's important, please see this post from 2 months ago: Steemit is Free, But Your Witness Vote Determines its Future.
For this report, I used @arcange's STEEMSQL.
MV stands for Million VESTS.
VESTS are like vested shares in Steemit and relate to Steem by a ratio (484.369 Steem per MV as of this report).
VESTS impact the weight of your vote on posts and the influence of your vote for Steemit Witnesses.
The three ways I'm filtering the data are:
All Accounts: No filter applied, includes all accounts.> 100,000: Accounts with 100,000 or more VESTS which is ~48 STEEM (~$62).> 0 Posts: Accounts which have posted at least once.
Overview
This shows the total number of accounts and VESTS
| Filter | Number of Accounts | VESTS | % of Total (Accounts / VESTS) |
|---|---|---|---|
| All Accounts | 298,712 | 383,235 MV | (100% / 100%) |
| > 100,000 VESTS | 24,505 | 378,826 MV | (8.2% / 98.8%) |
| > 0 Posts | 120,752 | 304,619 MV | (40.4% / 79.4%) |
Voters
This shows the total number of accounts and VESTS which have voted for a witness or set a proxy.
| Filter | Number of Accounts Voted (%) | VESTS Voted (%) |
|---|---|---|
| All Accounts | 11,915 (4%) | 134,302 MV (35%) |
| > 100,000 VESTS | 4,871 (19.9%) | 134,133 MV (35.4%) |
| > 0 Posts | 8,405 (7%) | 100,395 MV (33%) |
Voting For Inactive Witnesses
This shows the number of accounts which are currently voting for witness accounts in the top 100 there not currently active witnesses. This number should be 0.
| Filter | Number of Accounts Voting for Inactive | VESTS on Inactive |
|---|---|---|
| All Accounts | 1,993 (0.66%) | 35,524 MV (9.3%) |
| > 100,000 VESTS | 1,052 (4.3%) | 35,501 MV (9.4%) |
| > 0 Posts | 1,883 (1.6%) | 34,803 MV (11.4%) |
If you're voting for any of these inactive witness accounts, you should remove your vote unless you know they are only temporarily inactive:
nexus-dev
bitcube
hagie
dantheman
silversteem
blackwidow
steve-walschot
jabbasteem
tdv.witness
picokernel
kushed
bue
nextgencrypto
cyrano.witness
datasecuritynode
blockchained
moisesmcardona
enki
linouxis9
nonlinearone
mckenziegary
royaltiffany
dele-puppy
l0k1
My goal with this report is to collect this data over time and graph it so we can watch the trend as new accounts join Steemit and as accounts vote for witnesses.
Here are the top 50 accounts by VESTS (excluding 18 accounts which I think are Steemit employee accounts) which are not currently voting for a Steemit Witness:
| Account | VESTS |
|---|---|
| mottler | 4617011297 |
| databass | 3500010180 |
| ranchorelaxo | 2673733493 |
| proskynneo | 2403253522 |
| created | 1730004336 |
| safari | 1500015009 |
| batel | 1310388186 |
| bob | 1077657897 |
| alice | 954075907 |
| goku1 | 855564655 |
| recursive | 827310003 |
| newsflash | 728256264 |
| alvaro | 696470304 |
| azeroth | 560365384 |
| creator | 476774626 |
| systema | 463408410 |
| imadev | 445256469 |
| livingfree | 416472979 |
| another | 414009397 |
| skan | 399409869 |
| eeqj | 393434434 |
| kidrock | 353800013 |
| tyler | 333264283 |
| done | 326363327 |
| hiva | 309000000 |
| node1 | 278318186 |
| virus707 | 274804629 |
| figaro | 259935943 |
| sigizzang | 257718819 |
| damarth | 236365809 |
| bitcointalker | 234000000 |
| moderator | 232557143 |
| extrospect | 231760318 |
| moses153 | 228350578 |
| otisbrown | 225389254 |
| temet-nosce | 221877801 |
| natsu | 220050870 |
| ctrl-alt-nwo | 217425583 |
| modprobe | 216844448 |
| famunger | 209638899 |
| bramd | 206091554 |
| node2 | 202241146 |
| cornucopia | 199003496 |
| tim | 196183040 |
| biggest | 189000000 |
| trevonjb | 188288245 |
| bayrene | 188192516 |
| eclipse | 184318875 |
| layz3r | 182204153 |
| faddy | 180946157 |
These top 50 have 33,226 MV which could be applied to witness votes.
If you know people on this list, maybe encourage them to set a proxy voter or ask them why they aren't voting right now. Those like myself who are working to move up the witness ranks would sure appreciate their support.
Have You Voted for a Witness?
If you haven't voted yet, please consider setting @lukestokes as your proxy voter. Otherwise, go vote for some Steemit Witnesses you've interacted with and respect to do what's in the best interest of the network. I hope that includes my witness, @lukestokes.mhth.
Again, if you're not sure what a witness vote is, or why it's important, please see this post from 2 months ago: Steemit is Free, But Your Witness Vote Determines its Future.
Thank you! I hope you found this useful.
@lukestokes I immediately reviewed my witness list after your last article. Having understood the importance, I noticed that I had used only 8 slots out of my allotted 30 votes. Out of the 8, I am familiar with the work of 3-4 witnesses (including yourself) and know that they are consciously helping the Steemit platform growth. For the remaining, I seem to have voted impulsively - without knowing the significance of a witness responsibility. Will review that in coming weeks.
I hope the engagement by Senior Steemians with more Vests goes up day by day as a result of your report. Around 20% seems very low at the moment.
By the way - Is there anything more I can do to support your efforts - just having voted for witness seems so inadequate.
Regards,
I greatly appreciate your support and your regular, helpful comments. The blockchain rewards me well for the following I've built, so no worries there. :)
LOL. I guess my offering to help a Senior Steemian was like a firefly trying to help a Halogen lamp. A dedicated Steemian like you deserves all the rewards from the blockchain (I know nothing about how that happens). I meant to offer that, if any legwork helps you for your efforts for Steemit community, I would be happy to support for that.
Thank you. :)
meep
hey Luke,
thanks for this post
i had stumbled on voting for witnesses before and had done so since being involved in what you are writing on seemed logical
i will admit i chose a little at random but have put in a bit of time now and changed a few of my votes for people with better stats
But i had not realized that you were on there and had not read up on you either so i have remedied this and given you my vote for witness.
Use it wisely my friend :-)
Excellent, thank you for your vote. If I ever don't use it wisely, remove your vote for me and vote for someone who does. :)
I´ve honestly got to admit, that I just voted for very few witnesses yet. But as Steemit is growing pretty much these days I guess I have to get active and vote for some more reliable witnesses out there to keep everything running smoothly!
Thanks for reminding me @lukestokes!
Thanks for voting!
You're welcome @lukestokes. I really like the Quality of your Posts and how simple you explain things. So definitely worth my vote ;)
Nice post @lukestokes and great topic to spin further on.
I find it interesting that there are many users with more than 100k VESTS that have voted (134,133 MV (35.4%)) than users with at least one post (100,395 MV (33%)).
Shows we have a few investors only that hasn't posted anything.
We also have a very few ones (134,302 MV (35%)) that hasn't posted or invested much, but that are still voting.
Going to follow your upcoming posts on the topic.
To be clear, the two filters I'm using are not combined or additive. Meaning, I'm just filtering for MV > 100,000 in one case and just filtering for posts >=1 in the other. I don't have a filter for posts and MV together, though that might be interesting to look at.
Sorry, I may have been unclear on my part :)
What I ment was that the first part where you filter for everyone MV > 100k we have a higher MV than when you filter for more than 1 post. Meaning we have many users with a high MV power that hasn't posted anything.
If a user has > 100k MV and hasn't posted they will not be visible in your second statement.
Or maybe I'm just thinking wrong here...
That's what I meant about the filters not being added together. The second statement is just about those who haven't posted. It doesn't also take into account their MV amount. That means an account can be in both groups.
very, very useful update, thanks Luke. Especially the inactive witnesses, a couple of surprising names on that list by the way.
You've still got my vote, keep up the good work!
Cryptogee
Thank you very much!
Thanks @lukestokes for taking the time to make this post. It's important we support active Anna's engaged witnesses. I've upvoted this post and given you my witness vote. -dt
Thank you for both!
Thanks for the update-- I think using 100K vests as a base metric makes a lot of sense... I know in my very early days here, I didn't even know what a "witness" was, let alone did I vote for any... and I can't imagine I'd be alone in that.
So here's something I don't know: Do inactive witnesses eventually get removed from the list, or do they just stay there indefinitely, or till they... withdraw(?) themselves?
Inactive witnesses (as far as I understand) get skipped over when the system picks the next witness to produce a block. They don't harm the system in any way, but the fact that they still have votes is an indicator of voter apathy. If, for example, some top witness started doing something bad for the network, we'd have to vote them out. If people are still voting for witnesses who aren't even active, there's a good chance they'd still be voting for that witness account, even if the community was trying to remove them from an active witness spot.
I don't think there's a way to mark an account as no longer being a witness once the
update_witnesscommand is run for that account. It's not a bad thing to be an inactive witness. I understand if some started the process and then later decided they have other priorities. No worries there, but we should all be removing votes for accounts that are not active and put those votes towards accounts that are active and working to move up the rankings to hopefully produce enough blocks to pay for their server costs and time.Appreciate the info... fills in a few blanks.
Given what you're sharing here, it might be nice/useful (if possible) to extract and list a "last active" or "last block time" next to each witness' name when the "vote for witnesses" page displays. If one of the objectives is to get relative newcomers interested in voting... they perhaps we need to remove as many "tech-y layers" from the process as possible. I'd also submit that there needs to be a more concerted effort (perhaps among the active witnesses, themselves?) tp publicize that "voting for witnesses" isn't just something to "do once, and fuggetaboutit" but an ongoing process you need to re-visit now and then.
Agreed! These pages help:
https://steemd.com/witnesses
https://steemdb.com/witnesses
I've also asked @jesta to take the details on that steemdb page and include them on the individual account page where it says "Votes Cast" (example: https://steemdb.com/@lukestokes/witness click Votes Cast). That, I think, would be super helpful. Maybe even a popup if someone is voting for an inactive witness.
Not OP, but given the witness selection system's dependance on voting I would assume that, barring a witness' removal of themselves from consideration somehow, they would cease to be a witness whenever they no longer have one of the top number of votes.
But I've never seen this explicitly stated anywhere...
I think you're correct, I just don't think there's a way to actually remove the witness properties of an account once they are set.
Yeah, and upon further thought, I'm not even seeing how someone could remove such witness status from their own account, as I stated earlier might be possible. Perhaps that partially explains the number of Steemit employees, and such, on these listings.
Doesn't seem to be the best way to handle this issue long-term though. I must be missing something...
Which, coincidentally, is part of the reason so many people avoid voting in the first place - to avoid making a poor choice unintentionally. Even if you find some info. to inform your choice here, important particulars are still unable to be found, making the decision process somewhat murky...
I wish I could upvote this 100 times. As a new user I find this to be super helpful as it is valuable actionable information. Also, I'm not certain if a lot of users are aware of the mobile apps. That may encourage more engagement for witness voting.
Thanks for the encouragement! That's a good point about the mobile app. For new accounts who don't yet have much Steem Power, it may not matter as much as the accounts who have been here for some time.
Exactly how would someone like me know who's a witness I have heard of witness voting but I don't know who they are
I provided a link in my post explaining witness voting, both at the top and the bottom. You can also use the menu on the far right of the Steemit interface to get to the Vote for Witnesses page.
@lukestokes I have, so far, only voted 4 times; with 2 votes for members outside of the Top 50. Building relationships is a two-way course. Just because, a member has a high reputation, does not get an automatic nod from me. Far too many have built those reputations artificially.
I look for people who bring a total value to the entire Steemit community as evidenced by cogent and contributory posts. I have been here two weeks now and it can be challenging to discover whose who. That is a great deal of rabbit trails to explore and there is only so much time each day that I can devote to this site. Be well.
To be here two weeks and already be voting for witnesses is a great think! Thanks for getting involved.