Transparency Wins: Witness Insight Project
I introduced Witness Insight days ago with the bare prototype (Link). Thanks for the advices and criticisms as well as the detail feedback and also the brilliant ideas. Due to the concerns around the tool, I worked on project really hard to vanish the worries asap, and today I proudly reveal the first usable version of Witness Insight.
URL:
Direct:
http://steeme.com/witness/account (without @)
Motivation
Witnesses are the core of DPOS. They must be right and just, and should not be afraid of any criticism they might encounter during their service. They rather must proactively try to open up a communication channel with the public and explain what is the truth. If a witness sees his fault or any fault of their fellow witnesses, they must take an action immediately. Social cohesion can never affect their judgement.
Steemians and investors should monitor the witnesses's activities and must not hesitate to raise questions if anything is unclear.
Unfortunately there is not a straight forward process to archive this way of communication between the witnesses and the other Steemians, or at least each person needs to do some research to figure out what and how to do.
This tool started from there, and designed and implemented to help the three most important user groups in Steem community.
Steeminas with ownership
As many Steemians, especially those who have strong ownership, have been complaining about the lack of information when they want to make a good witness vote, we have to improve the transparency by opening up more visual and numeric metrics, as well as the activities and projects the witness are spending their time and efforts on.
Witnesses
Witnesses will be able to self monitor themselves through this tool, and avoid continuing something that is not beneficial for the Steem community.
Backup witnesses
Get noticed by the other Steemians and the top witnesses, and have more chance to get more support for their witness activities.
Main Page
The main page is just a simple table with limited information about the witnesses. Witnesses in 10th rank are included here in purpose.
Disabled witnesses are shown as a red row.
Here is the fun part. You see a small warning trangle next to your witness vote cast count. This icon means that one or more witnesses who are receiving your witness vote are disabled. The witness might be temporary or permanently disabled. The voter should figure out what is going on and take the chance to reorganise their witness votes. If you put your mouse cursor over the icon, you will see a popup explaining what that means.
In order to find out who is disabled, you need to open the witness report page. How? Next to the witness account name, there is a magnifier icon for browsing the detail report of the witness.
Witness Report
I will click the icon of @roelandp for the demo as his profile image looks quite fancy. A modal is open and the URL changes to be more dedicated URI. You can visit or share this witness report by sharing this link.
Witness Report shows the account profile and the simple witness status. Still there are a lot of work to do to complete the alarming features, but it is already functioning perfectly and actually looking not too bad.
If the witness account does not have the profile, users will see this message block. I personally think the account profile should be setup for every witness so that they can be recognised better.
Of course the profile is definitely not the most important, so the next section is "Witness Update" and "Projects / Activities". This parts are still not implemented yet. However these informations are critical for the Steemians who want to make their best witness voting. Therefore I will add these features in the next version. Although these are not implemented, I didn't remove the placeholders to respect the importance of them.
Chart, Chart, Chart!
Here are other fun parts. Charts that show the voting trend of the witness.
Inter-Witness Voting Trend
This simple three doughnut charts are quite intuitive.
- How many witness votes of this witness were cast to the top 20 witnesses and the proportion (left)
- How many witness votes this witness is receiving from the top 20 witnesses and the proportion (middle)
- The proportion of MVests from the other witnesses. (right)
These three charts tells so many things but I will leave the interpretation of these charts to you for now.
Witness voting distribution
There are two more charts that visualise the distribution of the witness votes. Also, this bar chats tell you which witness is disabled.
The first one shows the distribution of the witness's witness votes. Higher ranker is on the left while the lower ranker (up to 100th) is on the right. You might have already noticed that the colors in the report are well organised.
- Blue: top 20 witness
- Grey: backup witnesses or just others
- Red: Disabled witness
The second bar chart is the same apart from that it is about received votes from the other witnesses.
Conclusion
This tool is designed to help the three most important user groups in Steem community, that are witnesses, backup witnesses and the Steeminas with ownership. There is still a long long way to go, but I will try my best to make it as useful as possible in every release.
Needless to say, the investors will get definitely benefit from the better performing Steem community. So please use this tool, give me any feedback, ideas, questions, objections and also criticisms. I will work backward from there.
Witnesses should not be defensive nor be lazy. Let's be pragmatic and productive rather than emotional. Let's take the opportunity to improve all of us, and make a bigger impact.
Please consider voting @asbear as a witness!
Here is more about me.
https://steemit.com/witness-category/@asbear/witness-update-asbear-april-2018
Unfortunately my post is not well noticed by the people outside of KR community, so please consider resteeming it if you think this project is valuable.
Good job. Not getting a ton of insight from a quick read so I will look back over more in detail later. Love the concept of the report and appreciate you creating a tool for accountability and transparency of the leaders in Steemit.
I am voting for you as a witness now.
Thanks for the feedback and the witness vote!
This seems like you put a lot of work into this. Great job.. Going to check it out now. We need as much transparency as we can get on us witness's.
Hi @followbtcnews, hope you feel less concerned this time. :) And again, thanks for the feedback!
I am not concerned at all :).. I love this tool! I really congratulate you on a job well done and look forward to 100% witness transparency. I also love the idea of you putting witness projects on there. Great idea!
Thanks, really appreciate your kind words.
Steemians in KR community really want to participate in witness voting with the great knowledge about the witnesses but they usually give it up due to there is no centeral point where they can learn about the active witnesses, and it comes really hard to them due to their language barrier. So majority of them choose to proxy their witness voting to the most trusted people in the KR community. It should be simlar in the other non Enlglish speaking countries, and I want to make the witness voting less biased by opening up easy and straightford information which can easily be understood and even be translated to their local languages.
Thanls again, all the best!
Nice sharing my friend good luck
Thanks mate!
Thank you :)
Thanks!
I think its great idea
I fully support this project
I appreciate your support!
항상응원 드리는 입장인데 증인관련 내용은 좀 어렵네요 번역기 돌려 읽어보지만 정리가 않되는군요 ㅎㅎㅎ
제가 툴을 새로 만든걸 올렸는데.. 언제나와 마찬가지로.. 싸늘한 반응입니다.. ㅎㅎ
한글로 정리해보겠습니다!
ㅎㅎㅎ 잘읽어 보겠습니다
분위기로만 짐작 해보는데 그쪽이 좀 그럴듯 합니다 표현하신 그대로 싸늘.
그래도 반대인 사람들도 분명 있으니 화이팅 하세요 ~ ~
Wow it has been improved a lot since the first version!
Fully support what you're doing here 👍🏻
I shared this on steemdevs slack channel (as well as the first introduction post), but it seems witnesses are not really interested in this.. 😞
I am invisible and this topic is a bit sensitive for witnesses so I am not surprised that no one cared. thanks for your support! :)
Very nicely done!
One thing I'd like to see (which is quite difficult to do and visualize) is how many accounts someone votes for before they are top 20 witnesses. If we just say "Hey, that person votes for a bunch of top 20 who also vote them back!" and see it as a negative, that's a little misleading. If someone instead votes for a great up-and-coming witness who, over time, makes it to the top 20 then that should be a positive example of the benefit that witness is brining to the ecosystem. They recognized value early on and supported it.
Make sense? I think some of the people in the top 20 I vote for weren't in the top 20 when I voted for them originally, but it would be hard for someone to determine that unless there was a time dimension involved as to when they voted. Again, maybe not easy to do, but quite interesting.
Hey @lukestokes, first of all I really appreciate your comment and the suggestion. I clearly see your point. And I know what you worry. Some other witnesses also worried about the possible misleading.
To be clear, I want witnesses to be prepared for the misleading, and bold enough to proudly deal with the questioning from the other Steemians.
In order to avoid the unnecessay dispute, I hope witnesses groom their voting as often as possible, and check if the witnesses they are voing to are still in a good state. Currently 5 of the top 20 witnesses are voing to some disabled witnesses. It's been quite while actually. I think this is not a trivial problem.
Last but not least, some witnesses are not actively working as a witness apart from the block producing and the price feeding, while many other backup witnesses are devotig their time abd effort for Steem not to mention the basic role of the Witnesses. Then do they really deserve your vote? I hope the top witnesses stimulates each others and get improved together, and support the outstanding backup witnesses by their witness vote. Witnesses voting will anyway never make the votee to be top 20 witnesses anyway, but it will really really encourge the votee and the others.
Sorry for this long reply. I really will try to make the metrics not to mislead people anyway. Our goal is the same isnt it. "Make Steem greater, and get rewarded"
Thanks again, all the best!
Votes from accounts like @freedom really make the difference, for the most part. Who witnesses vote for matters less, depending on their VESTs and how many people proxy through them. Maybe it would be useful to show the top active voters by VESTS as well who aren't witnesses? Their votes make a huge difference, more so than who the witnesses vote for.
The challenge with much of this is some of the top witnesses provide a lot of value in hours and hours of very high level discussion regarding game theory, economics, code changes, strategies, etc which is really valuable to STEEM and yet much of that happens behind the scenes. Those who know about it vote accordingly. Those who don't, think they are providing no value other than block production. I'd prefer more openness in these discussions and more involvement from backup witnesses (ideally, I'd like for it to happen here on the blockchain), but I also recognize when there are too many people in a discussion, you end up with noise. It's a tricky problem with no easy solution. Maybe a read-only discussion system where the top 100 witnesses and a select group of 50 or so major investors along with employees of Steemit, inc could all dialogue but it would be read-only for everyone else?
The challenge there is some may not freely speak their mind and try out new crazy ideas because of concerns that those listening will take things out of context and hold it against them. There are also security concerns where the top witnesses need to respond quickly to private information that has been responsibly disclosed before it's made public in order to protect the chain.
This, I am one of those who does not know what is being discussed between the top witnesses. I definitely appreciate what you guys are doing behind the scene. No doubt it. but "Woking behind the scene" can also mislead how the people think the witnesses do. I really hope that the discussion results are published immediately to the public. For this, top 20 witnesses should post summary of the discussion in rota probably.
Top 20 witnesses should think themselves as public figures. Never forget that they are paid around $24000 a month now. As you suggested, the pre-scheduled regular meeting with the read-only audiences should be a really great idea. I will fully support it!
Again, witnesses like you, who try to keep the communication channel open, are really important for DPOS. To be utterly honest, a lot of Steemians worry about the unprofessionalism amongst the witnesses. They just do not dare (have power) to make their voice. Actually BP's of EOS worry me. They are incredibly professional and absolutely transparent, and that fact dwarves the witnesses of Steem as we look very amateur compared to them. But we can initiate the positive change if the top 20 witnesses change their mind.
Sorry if I am being too pessimistic. This is coming out from my enthusiasm for Steem, but please just take this as a constructive criticism.
I think you made a lot of important points here, and I've shared your comment with others as well. Here's what I said:
That's cool.
This is to the point. So true especially for those who are pioneering the blockchain innovation. Many thanks.
And forgot to mention, the metric will be quite interesting, will think about it. Surely really difficult even with SteemSQL though :-)
Yep. I figured it would be tricky. I'll be doing an updated witness engagement report this week, and I too try to draw attention to people voting for inactive witnesses.
It would be great to be mentioned in your witness enngagement report indeed. No one will say any negative about it. Cheers!