These are the factors taken into consideration whenever you are ready to vote your witness. As a fraud analyst, I had a keen observation of how the steem blockchain works, how witnesses were able to make an impact for the success of the whole process itself. My basic research, 11 days ago on what does the Witnesses do here on steemit and showed you their current rankings you to the top 50.
This gives you the very best idea if they are really needed here on steemit or not. Basically YES. They play a great role in the complex world of Steem on the cellular level or the blockchain itself.
When you are a newbie, just like me, do not feel compelled to vote a witness because you see other people's posts are plagued with banners about their groups and witnesses they have voted for.
Here are my criterias;
Make a research about your witness if they have missed signing blocks. This is the technical side of what really witnesses should do.
Are they a member of The Sacred 20? Means are they belonging to the top 20 wintesses on Steemit?
They are the ones who can decide for any software changes
What projects are they offering in the steem blockchain and steemit itself to make steemit a better place to flash your contents and the ease that we will all have if we incorporate Steemit in our lives.
How well we're they able to promote the proliferated usage of Steem in the internal and external trading sites and exchanges.
How well they are able to set up witness nodes.
People skills, choose a witness that really reaches out to people that supports him or her.
Witnesses should also have discord groups and administer or host a channel where people can learn and interact with them.
How open and brave enough are they to escalate flaws and call out the attention of a fellow whale / witness.
As a newbie these are my factors of how I should pick my witness to support.
I would also like to add that at least they were able to acknowledge your efforts and somehow showed a little appreciation of your masterpiece.
As for me I did. I already have a wintess!
My top witnesses in no particular order
Follow me and see more updates about witnesses here on steemit.
Sir Terry 
Let's keep the fire of compassion, kindness, generosity and sense of responsibility burning inside of us to make steemit a better place for us to blog all these things we want to post.
