First of all, I would like to thank 
The Political System of DPOS
Being a witness, specially a top 19 witness, gives you Steem (money), but most importantly it gives you power to decide on Steem changes. To be a witness you need to be voted upon, so it’s in essence a Political System. Like any other political system, you need to negotiate and make alliances for others support, this results in what many people may call a "circle jerk", as many witness vote for others expecting a vote back.
DPOS is not a perfect system, but it is the best system I have seen on all Blockchains, on POW (Bitcoin) or POS (Peercoin), the only thing that counts is your resources to either buy miners or to buy the coin that allows you stake, this is of course not very democractic.
However, on DPOS (Bitshares and Steem) you need others support, this results on most witnesses collaborating in projects that contribute to the growth of Steem, they do this to get votes and people vote for them because of their work, we all win. In essence, is like politicians who get votes based on their social work, the only difference is that you can vote and unvote a witness at any time you see fit.
It is not all a conspiracy
Most witnesses know one another, because we talk about technical stuff needed to run a node, we often help each other when one runs into a problem, so normally you would vote for that witness that helped you out.
What I am trying to say is that YES, there is a "circle jerk", but the reasons for that result are not really a conspiracy:
- Making alliances and negotiating with other powerful human beings is normal to any political system
- It is also logical to vote for witnesses that you have had previous association with.
Is there anything we can do to make the system fairer?
The only real way to stop the so call "circle-jerk" is to get everyone to vote, there are plenty of big whales that do not vote on any witness and this is actually prejudicial to the system. If big whales do not vote, then they contribute to making the "circle-jerk" stronger as witnesses just vote for each other and decide who gets to be on the top 19.
