I had a great conversation today with a few witnesses on Discord - thanks to those who participated, including @arcange, @sircork, @drakos and others. We discussed a variety of topics but one in particular caught my attention... The problem of the difficulty witnesses face in gaining votes and specifically, the unfair layout of the witness voting page.
Newsflash: There Are MORE Than 50 WITNESSES For STEEM!
If we look at the witness voting page in Steemit.com, we can see that there is a list of 50 witnesses and we can click on each of their names and place a vote for them. We are told that we have 30 votes, so we need to vote for 30 witnesses. It is no secret that many users have no clue about what witnesses do, why they should vote for them or why they have 30 votes. So it seems that many voters are simply semi-randomly choosing 30 out of the 50, without really making informed decisions. In other cases, voters might have some idea of who to vote for but not realise that there are actually more than 50 witnesses available to vote for because they only ever see 50 in the list.
Can you imagine a democratic vote where you can only see 30% of the candidates on the ballot sheet? What kind of bad democratic joke is that? And yet that is what we have on the Steemit witness voting page.
The top 19 witnesses receive payouts from the rewards pool of potentially more than half a million US Dollars annually each! So they have a huge advantage as compared to other witnesses when it comes to keeping themselves in the top positions. The fact that their huge earnings can directly translate into Steem Power which then adds weight to their own standing in the list of witnesses (since they vote for themselves) means that it is already very difficult for lower ranked witnesses to challenge them, but what chance does anyone have if they aren't even visible on the ballot paper?
Sadly, this is actually quite an accurate mirroring of the democratic process that passes for 'fair' in modern nations, whereby huge amounts of money are needed to run for election and once elected, huge amounts of money become accessible - so those who have been elected previously have an advantage over any one who wants to participate next time.
Low Voter Engagement
The financial situation is not the only similarity between the witness voting system and national democratic processes. In both cases, there is a low level of voting occurring - which often is due to voter apathy.. Which is a sad thing to say for both nations and Steem alike.
It was suggested that the overall level of voter engagement for witnesses on Steem is maybe only 20% (ish) of Steem users even vote for witnesses at all. There are numerous reasons why this is a problem for the platform, not least that it means that many Steemians are missing out on an opportunity to guide the platform's destiny to some extent, since Witnesses do have some level of ability to effect which code/policy changes are adopted when they are proposed. If most of the community is not participating in choosing the top witnesses, then their wishes are not being represented in the process of evolving the rules of the Steem eco-system.
Making Witness Votes Great (again)
How about we put some real passion into solving this problem? It was suggested to link to @drakos' witness listing page from the witness voting page in Steemit to make things more transparent and balanced, but I think that is not really good enough (not least because it is hardly fair if a democratic process itself relies on one of the candidates.... No disrespect to Drakos, but it would be like having a national election sponsored by one of the parties ;) )
I strongly think we need to have the witness voting page updated to include all registered witnesses and not just the top 50. Sadly though this has apparently not only already been suggested many times, but the code change required has already been added to Github, but it has not been accepted by Steemit Inc. - Is this true? I don't know, but I would like to know why it hasn't been actioned if the code is already available.
What do you think?
Wishing you well,
Ura Soul
Vote @ura-soul for Steem Witness!
View My Witness Application Here
