Time for more fun Steem Stats! This time it's all about witness votes and who are the witnesses receiving the most witness votes in recent months.
This information is doubly useful, since not only does it show us which witnesses have attracted the most attention more recently, but it also shows us (roughly) what would happen if we activated a 'witness vote decay' feature.

Witness vote decay refers to the idea that witness votes could expire after a certain time period, ensuring that witness votes stay relevant and preventing, for example, whales using the blockchain, choosing witnesses and then never again returning. If whales make votes in this way and then, worst case scenario, actually die physically - then it is possible that their votes would last forever and regardless of what the witnesses do, they may stay in power!
This would be a huge problem as it would mean that the entire witness voting system would fail. There are other issues with having witness votes that never expire too. I covered some of them in previous posts about vote decay.
In any case, what we have below are two tables, each showing 100 Steem witnesses (only the 100 who last produced blocks at the time of generating the report are shown here). Each table orders the witnesses according to the value of the votes they have received ONLY during the previous 3 months (first table) and 6 months (second table). From this we get a sense of who has been active and engaging the community in some way recently vs. who has perhaps displeased the community recently or just not been so active and not received so many new votes.
Note on vote decay: If Witness vote decay were activated then this is what the witness tables might look like, but such a feature should not be enabled without giving us due notification that the votes were about to expire and allowing us to renew them in advance, so that they never actually expire if we don't want them to. Therefore, the actual final witness tables would be different to these as some percentage of the votes would be renewed. The actual end result would be somewhere in between the tables below and the current witness ranking tables visible on steemit.com and elsewhere.
Note on data: I put a couple of days of coding and testing into these tables, it is the first time I have worked with witness vote data and I found there are a few pitfalls involved with the data. I aimed to test my results by comparing them to the existing data available from ' site steemian.info, however, I found a bug in the way his code was calculating the totals for proxy votes that slowed me down and caused me to scratch my head. He has now confirmed to me that this is a bug on his site and he is fixing it. I think therefore, that my data is accurate, but if you know differently then let me know in the comments and I will investigate. Thanks!
I'll be posting this data every so often and adding a page to Steem Ocean for it too if it is found to be useful.
These tables are better viewed in steempeak.com than in steemit.com as steempeak adds horizontal scrollbars to wide tables.
100 Most Voted Witnesses In The Last 3 Months
100 Most Voted Witnesses in The Last 6 Months
So there we have it - Some interesting results there, for sure! Let us know your comments below.
Wishing you well,
Ura Soul
I am currently among the top 100 in the Steem User Authority Table
Vote
for Steem Witness!
(Witnesses are the computer servers that run the Steem Blockchain.
Without witnesses there is no Steem, Steemit, DTube, Utopian or
Busy... You can really help Steem by making your 30 witness votes count!)