I guess I can consider this my first witness update post even though it has been under a week since I officially announced myself as a witness. All the same I wanted to get this post out quickly so that I could possibly impact something I feel is important, inactive witnesses and your witness vote.

Inorder to see what I mean by this, all you have to do is head over to https://steemd.com/witnesses (may take a minute to load) and scroll down to around position 70. This is where it starts to get a bit ugly looking. Now I do want to make clear that most witnesses above this level are some great users who have a great track record and have proven to be good witnesses. So even if some of them go inactive from time to time its usually for a good reason and they are very open about it.

The reason for this post is to bring to the entire communities attention that a lot of your witness votes have been misplaced and are now helping inactive witnesses stay seated in the top 100. This to me is a wasted vote and creates an unhealthy and unappealing witness pool. Imagine all top 100 witnesses fully active, it would look extremely sexy ;)

If your reading my post and hopefully you actually are... head over to https://steemit.com/~witnesses and make sure your votes are properly placed on active witnesses. For example Hive account@kushed, although you may think their a great and powerful whale they have not been active since HF 0.16.1. So go ahead and remove your vote, and while your at it vote for me ;) why not?! And others (of course) who have worked hard to stay active and have yet to break the top 50 because votes haven't been cast.

I understand, that how this witness system works, these inactive accounts do not cause serious or fatal issue with STEEM but I still think its in our best interest to keep it clean. Consider a possible change that could come within the next hard fork, where inactive witnesses, that have been inactive for a period of time will automatically lose votes. This both keeping the user who voted informed and keeping the active witnesses ranked and listed correctly.

What I've seen while both learning about being a witness and becoming one is the lack of knowledge by the majority of users on what a witness actually is and that they have a say in who becomes one. As a user of steemit you get to choose someone that you trust, someone that will help decide what direction this platform will go in, don't you want to have a part in that? Its easy, stay up to date with whom you've voted for and simply make sure to utilize those 30 votes you have.

Let's Get Active!