Background:
Witnesses play a very important role in the Steemian society and as a result much of their activities have been scrutinized and discussed at length. I have been wanting to write this post ever since I had a chance to see the information on steemstats.com about the witness votes, but the data for this analysis actually comes from steemd.com (as of 3rd November 2017). Since all users on Steemit are encouraged to vote for witnesses, and everyone is allowed 30 votes in total, I wondered how the top 30 witnesses voted.
The Big Picture:
The average number of witness votes casted by the top 30 witnesses was 27.43
This figure would have been very close to 30 if not for @blocktrades and @busy.witness casting less than 10 witness votes. It was also interesting to see a few witnesses not casting their full 30 votes, perhaps saving a couple of spare votes up their sleeves or just not having had time to cast their votes completely.
Of the 823 votes casted by the top 30 witnesses, 23 (2.79%) were unique user accounts not voted by anyone else in the top 30 witnesses, which we can see visually here by the white cells:
To me this appears to suggest that there is reasonable agreement between the top 30 witnesses as to who are trustworthy to be witnesses and not overlooked by other members in the group. Interestingly enough, of those 23 unique votes, 10 were given by @jerrybanfield, which made up one-third of his 30 votes.
Witness popularity amongst themselves:
Of the 823 votes casted by the top 30 witnesses, 498 (60.51%) went to themselves, including votes that they cast to themselves.
The most popular witnesses were @clayop and @abit collecting 25 votes from the top 30 witnesses, and the least popular witnesses were @jerrybanfield and @ihashfury with 7 votes from the top 30 witnesses.
Witness trustworthiness amongst themselves:
I did a quick count and it appeared that 20 out of the 30 witnesses voted for themselves, which is rather interesting because it would seem like they would probably all have voted for themselves to increase their ranking. Something that I also thought would be interesting to look at was the difference between the number of votes that a witness got from the top 30 witnesses and the number of votes that they gave to the top 30 witnesses:
So @blocktrades and @abit received substantially more votes from the top 30 witnesses than they gave votes to the top 30 witnesses (although they both casted less than the 30 votes that they held), while @cervantes and @ihashfury received substantially less votes from the top 30 witnesses than they gave votes to the top 30 witnesses. This is what it looks like visually with the blue cells marking the votes given to the top 30 witnesses.
@clayop was definitely the most trusting of the top 30 witnesses with 25 of his 30 votes going to them, while @jerrybanfield was least trusting of the top 30 witnesses with only 9 of his 30 votes going to them. That means of the 30 witness votes he held, 10 went to users that no one in the top 30 had picked, 11 went to users that at least one other witness in the top 30 had also voted for that were not in the top 30, with the 9 remaining votes actually going to the top 30 (including himself).
I suspect that there might be some interesting variations in the voting patterns between the top 30 witnesses and the next group of ranked witnesses, but hopefully this has given you some food for thought when it comes to the voting behaviour of the top 30 witnesses, and I hope @paulag and @eastmael might be interested in digging a little bit deeper and see where we might be able to go with this analysis (since I need to get back to some #infographics).
Disclaimer: the information used in this analysis and the interpretation of the data are not guaranteed to be 100% accurate, but I have made every effort not to draw conclusions from the results except to highlight insights I have gained from visualizing the information. All comments, suggestions and feedback are welcomed in order to improve the quality of the analysis.
'I am part of a Steemit Business Intelligence community. We all post under the tag #BIsteemit. If you have an analysis you would like carried out on Steemit data, please do contact me or any of the #bisteemit team and we will do our best to help you...
Great analysis!
It might be interesting to add the relative voting powers of the witnesses. I looked at the steemreport for the top 50 witnesses (http://www.steemreports.com/witness-voters/) and it's clear that blocktrades has a very significant influence but I couldn't see how large the other witnesses were or whether their voting made a significant impact overall or not.
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Hi @miniature-tiger, I checked https://steemdb.com/witnesses for the individual voter power of the witnesses (and you are right about blocktrades having a significant influence) but I wasn't exactly sure how the voting system for witnesses worked so I didn't go further with the analysis. It would be great to track the movement of the witness rankings rather than having to crunch the numbers repeatedly, and see what the trends are below the top 30 ranked witnesses to see how they are jostling to get to the top spots.
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well done on this analysis, really good work and entry to the bisteemit weekly contest.
Most of the top witnesses hold massive power, and a vote from one of these will sustain you as a witness even if you are doing a #shite# job
Might look into all of this a bit further as you have suggested :-)
Oh you could present the data in an #infographic too
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Hi @paulag, the quality of the entries in the contest are really high, and this is one of the channels where you can be guaranteed to get some great insights but it also takes a lot of hard work too :D I have read some ideas about alternate voting systems for witnesses on steemit and I think one of the interesting aspects about doing BI is not just to tell the story with data, but to help make sensible decisions so I hope to work on future posts that pose questions about what types of decisions we can make using the information that we have. In particular, UX design relies on both quantitative and qualitative data and I am collaborating with another friend to do some user analysis so stay tuned!
Also I love the suggestion of doing an infographic on this, not sure why I didn't think of it :D
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looking forward to seeing more of your posts :-)
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Great post @plushzilla! This is the kind of in depth analysis that I think should be rewarded, I wish I had a bigger upvote but I can definitely give you my heartfelt thanks for taking the time to do this! @jerrybanfield being an outlier wasn't surprising to me, as he has managed to upset most of the top witnesses a few times (I personally believe without bad intent behind his actions). It also isn't particularly surprising to me that you don't see more self upvoting - the spirit of Steemit is very much a spirit of giving. Self upvoting is really kind of noxious in any form.
You already have your hands full with this line of analysis but I am curious now about the regular Steemit upvoting habits of the top 30 witnesses, how often they upvote posts, how many unique authors they upvote per week, do they resteem posts by other authors, etc.
I am really happy I happened to see your mention of this post in the PowerBI Discord server - following you and looking forward to more! Cheers - Carl
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Hi @carlgnash, I heard people on the Discord bisteemit channel mention all the great work that you do for people there. I know that @paulag did a very thorough analysis on voting behaviour of Witnesses and I just wanted to complement it with some additional information. Thanks for your support and kind words of encouragement :)
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That's an interesting analysis. It's good to see that some witnesses vote for Minnows and Red Fish too and not just each other, for regular upvotes and who don't hog the witness votes, but vote fairly for each other.
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Hi @binkyprod, I was a bit hesitant to comment on the way witnesses voted only because there is no 'benchmark' that defines what is acceptable behaviour and what would be seen as nepotism among the witnesses. Of course, there are those that have voted very differently to others by the metrics I have measured but I assume that under different voting rules we would see different results. I hope to do a follow up to this and perhaps look outside the top 30 and see if the patterns hold or not. Thanks for the comments :)
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That sounds like a good idea. Top 30 and then the next 30 below them. Also checking the stats at various times of the month and such. After regular checks, you may begin to see a pattern. I wouldn't know where to begin, but it could give us an idea of what type of content these witnesses tend to enjoy. I know Cervantes (I believe that's the name) has voted on a couple of my posts, which I found amazing. It can give us a look into their personalities.
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Hi @binkyprod, I think the information that you are looking for in terms of how the witnesses and 'whales' vote has been looked in previous bisteemit posts, but perhaps not to the same depth and over a long period of time as you have suggested. My post was looking at how witnesses used their witness votes and what it might mean, but I will have a think about your comments and see if we can look into this topic in a future post :)
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Oh ok, cool. I'll have a look at the #bisteemit tag for those other posts too.
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After this analysis I feel all I'm looking at is a circle of people self-voting themselves to gain access to the reward pool.
Really makes me reconsider what Steemit is all about.
Thought it was curation, turns out bots and greed are the real drivers.
Very depressing.
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Hi @talltim, it is possible to draw any number of conclusions from the data but we have to be careful about making assumptions about intent. If you look at it one way, it seems like witnesses do vote for people in the top 30 than they would other people, but perhaps if you looked at the rest of the Steemians you may find that they also vote for the top 30 more than other sections of the witness population. Of course there are certain biases that result in this, but it is also possible that the top 30 are there because of the things that they have done for fellow Steemians in the past that has put them up there.
One of the hardest thing to figure out in science (and statistics) is the relationship between cause and effect. My analysis is intended to help promote discussion and encourage more people to uncover information and look deeper, so we should all go and do some more digging and see where the 'truth' is buried before making conclusions :)
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You're very diplomatic and reserved in your analysis, so allow me to be crude and basic.
They are self-voting each other, using their accumulated power/status to further themselves.
That smacks of corruption and a huge lapse in ethics to me. It also takes the wind out of my sails when it comes to making new things.
They're so busy with their Machiavellian machinations that they don't have time for the "little people". Fantastic. Well, as far as I'm concerned they can have a deep conversation with bots - because that is where this platform is headed.
All little bots voting and commenting to each other, with nary a real creator in sight.
That is what they're promoting at the moment, and they frankly deserve it if they are that short-sighted.
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Hi @talltim, I guess you could call it diplomatic or the fact that I haven't been here that long and there's still a lot I don't know. I assume that you have read a fair bit of the posts from #bisteemit to get a feel of some of the discussions and debates that are happening from the numbers being dredged up. It is not always what it seems, because as someone who has been doing user research, people don't always do what they say and say what they do. I hope to have more solid data and research behind me next time I go digging through the blockchain data, but if you support people like @paulag, @eastmael and others on bisteemit we will keep digging and looking :)
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is not the self vote required to be able to use the delegated proxy votes from own followers?
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Hi @camendes70, you've got me there with that particular question... I would assume that this is not the case because those witnesses that didn't self vote must have some way to do this (unless they deliberately don't want to). Actually, the other thing is that some users maintain a witness account separate to their personal account.
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