I never used to understand steem witnesses and what it stands for; but you will have an idea after reading this.
For a while, i was not really concerned about what steem witnesses represents so i had no idea what it meant until my friend 
I have sure voted him as a witness and if you're wondering why you should too, read here
However,there are some people who still don not understand the concept due to many thinned information circulating about what witnesses are and how they operate. This post should briefly explain this the simplest way possible.
Witnesses are the cogs in the strange mechanism of Steemit. Without them, nothing moves. Literally nothing!
Witnesses have a lot of role to play in the steem network,one can may be tempted to say the network would go no where without the good works of the witnesses. In my opinion, Witnesses are to the steem network what miners are to bitcoin.
In his post 
A STEEM witness is a person whom operates a witness server (which produces blocks), and publishes a price feed of STEEM/USD to the network.
Witnesses have many tasks. The first and foremost is to produce blocks (thus process transactions), the second most important is to produce a price feed, which is how STEEM Dollars are always worth 1 US Dollar in STEEM (using the 7 day exchange).
You may have heard of the term 51% attack before. Unlike Bitcoin, miners don't matter much to the STEEM network, instead, that is a witnesses job:
A hard fork happens when 67% of the top witnesses are all running a certain version of STEEM, which means the top 19 witnesses can pick and choose whether to agree with a fork or not. (e.g. Hard Fork 13 and 14 were both postponed for a week, and re-designed because witnesses refused to update)
A steem witness has a good-track record , as a witness, it means he is respected by other individuals to have earned their votes. Yes! To become a witness, you must be voted by the community; we'll get to that part anyways.
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They produce blocks (i.e process transactions) just like miners in the Bitcoin network.
They are responsible for setting and maintaining price feeds and interest rates. if you have been wondering how SBD functions, grab a Witness to get the right answers.
They contribute a lot positively to how steem network operates. They work on important tools to further aid the growth of the entire steem network.
Witnesses are Technology Experts in Steemit Blockchain. Everything you and I do on Steemit such as: posting, voting, commenting, transferring funds, claiming rewards, these are transactions. Every transaction must be
Transmitted,
Validated,
Processed and
Be stored on the Blockchain.
So, our Steemit Expert Witnesses make sure everything that you and I do is actioned and finalized.
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Through votes.
Question that is likely to pop in your head is how you can become a witness right? you should also ask yourself if you have if all it takes to become one. if the answer is yes? then you will have to be voted by the community. That means you must earn the trust of every individual that must vote you.
To vote your favorite witness is very simple just follow the step below
visit the witness page https://steemit.com/~witnesses
Scroll down and enter his/her username in the box:
useClick on Vote
I hope this post gives a quick understanding of steem witnesses to those of us that had no idea.
