Witnesses are important in this grand adventure we call steemit, steem blockchain, and now busy.org. You have votes with your account you can cast on who is a witness.

The top 19 are rewarded the most for being a witness, and they help keep this project running.

It is important to know your witnesses though. Each of us should take some time every so often to have a look at our witnesses. See if they actually are helping the platform.

Have they said "I don't care" or have they shown actions that they are more focused on their own interest? If this is the case they definitely should be part of the community, but should they be representing ALL of us?

There are a lot of different ways to make money from the platform. Some of these methods actually involve manipulating the value of steem itself. If they can for example take actions that cause people to leave the platform, or make big negative PR announcements about the platform, or perhaps some other negative action then that could impact the value of steem and cause it to decline.

If they have been powering down their accounts and setting that currency aside in the form of bitcoin, they can wait for the price to drop to low levels and turn around and buy way more power than they started with. This should increase their ability to influence the platform more. At this point they likely would do positive things to help drive the price up. Once it has risen quite a ways they could repeat the process again.

I am not saying this IS happening, I am stating that it could be happening, and if a person is truly focused on "It's my vote, I'll vote how I want" and they are attacking and flagging other users are they truly someone that should be a witness?

I am not going to point out people. I wanted to stress the importance of this and now I'm going to share with you some tools for how to vote for witnesses, and how to research your witnesses.

To vote for a Witness... you want to open the menu to the left of your avatar/profile picture.

You then want to click on Vote for Witnesses

It will bring up a page like that. Notice how mine says I have 6 votes remaining. I need to go through the list and research some people and see whom I'd like to give some votes to. I often listen to witnesses that campaign as well.

I have also removed my votes before from people that seemed to be colluding to game the system, and I've decided I will no longer support any witnesses that endorse subjective down voting. If they are down voting to fight plagiarism (prove it first - don't do guilty until proven innocent), Spam, Abuse, or to fight people PROVEN to be gaming the system then I'll support them. If they are down voting for reasons other than those I will not support them as I believe it harms the platform and they do not represent me.

You should support whom you believe represents you, even if your views differ from my own.

You can also type in a user name there and vote for someone that hasn't yet made it into the top 50. I have done this for numerous people that have ended up making it into the top 50.

Apparently if you don't want to vote for witnesses you can pick someone you really trust to vote on your behalf. If you don't think you'll have time to invest to keep on top of this then this might be a good idea for you. Ideally you would do your own voting, but that is not always feasible for everyone.

How can I research witnesses

You can of course go to their steemit.com account. I am going to use @klye as the witness I show an example of here. It is not because he is good, or bad, but I actually like him and I think he truly does care about all of steemit succeeding and not just his own self interest. I also needed someone that might have some witness related posts in the information here. Otherwise I'd simply have used my personal account.

That is his basic page and you can look at comments, replies, etc there. Yet you likely want more details than this. There are other tools. I am only going to talk about two of them here.

steemd.com

Steemd is a unique view into the blockchain. It is not as user friendly but it offers a lot of detail.
You can just change the steemit.com in the web address to steemd.com and the rest is the same.

The Publish Feed Price is a witness related update. You will see notes like this on witnesses as well as others. The non-witness user you will not see these.

You can see votes, up vote, down vote, including what percentage of their voting power they used.

You can see transfers of currency and if you click on the number to the left of that transaction you can get even more details.

This can be useful if you think something odd is going on but generally that level of detail on a transaction is only needed by you if you are contacting Poloniex, Bittrex, Blocktrades, etc to say "I am missing a deposit... where is it?" They will want this detailed information. So most likely you'll typically only drill down to this level for yourself, and not when looking at others.

Down votes look similar.

Steemwhales.com

I like using steemwhales.com to get some quick information. A lot of people also use steemstats.

See the little piggy bank icon to the right of some names?

That is a quick visual indicator of which accounts are powering down. Powering down is not necessarily a bad thing.

In fact some people have been yelling they think whales should power down to more favorably distribute the steem power.

Yet powering down does not mean they lose the steem. They reduce their steem power, by converting it to steem which they can send to an exchange and trade it for bitcoin.

So let's say they sell 1000 steem at $0.20 each. They trade for bitcoin. If the price of bitcoin remains stable, and the price of steem drops to $0.10 each they could theoretically trade bitcoin for 2000 steem, send it to steemit.com and power up their steem power by double what they powered down.

If the price of bitcoin is actually increasing (which it has been) this is further amplified.

So powering down is not a good thing, or a bad thing. It can be either of those things. I truly depends upon motives, what the people do with that power, etc.

It'd be easy to power down a powerful account, create a new one which they power up to an even greater power under a name no one knows, and continue actions as usual.

You can use the ACCOUNT numbers and other details to sometimes tell if an account is likely the same person. If they are taking and sending money to the same exchange accounts as another account then it is likely they are affiliated in some way.

Now try plugging klye into the name field here...

You can also sort the display by Rep, Post Count, etc simply by clicking on one of those column headers, but you have to retype in a name if you want to see a specific person.

You can also drill down on your target by clicking on their name which is a hyperlink.

It generates quite a few cool graphs you can look at, and the tabs are useful, and toggling between daily, and weekly is nice.

You might start to ask yourself some questions based upon the graphs and they may help you decide upon witnesses as well.

In Conclusion

I hope you will take witness voting seriously or at the very least find someone you believe would make a good proxy and set them as your proxy. Preferably you will do your own research so you'll be better positioned to influence steemit/busy/steem blockchain in what you deem is a positive direction.

Some powerful people you may deem truly do not have the platform's best interest at heart. If they are a witness this is one way you can make your dissatisfaction known. It is better than starting flag wars.

And to everyone that agrees with "I can vote how I want"... yes, you can. Yet you are also responsible for the consequences of your vote.

Steem On!