Given that the list was intended to be the top 100, you would think that would include the top 100. If we wanted to be specific, we could include only those witnesses that aren't disabled. Either way, my point still stands: I was left out by an oversight by the OP. Is the fact that a witness doesn't respond to this post because the poster forgot to tag them in it indicative of something? I'd think not.
Moreover, we're all here on the blockchain. You can find us in any number of different places. By all means, strike up a conversation. I'll never not answer questions. You can find the list of top 100 witnesses on https://steemd.com/witnesses. Steemit.chat has a #witness-social room where witnesses discuss non-technical things, and I'm certain you could ask your questions there as well if you want to get an idea of who we are.
I'm just betting that the method by which it was generated was flaky. As far as I can tell, dealing with the blockchain API guts is somewhere between a black art and doing a tap dance while standing on your head and puppeting the shoes with your hands. So it's absolutely believable to me that somewhere at the bottom of that list is a place where things got jiggled around a little bit.
Though I will point out that you are here and being a productive part of the discussion, so maybe we should use the question of whether a witness interacts with this post or not as a marker of quality. It would certainly serve you positively if so. Maybe you would move up from 92.
Yes, we are all here on the blockchain – but let's not be silly. The blockchain is just a distributed database. For the most part, at least as implemented within the Steemit architecture, it's a forum with some silly fake money attached. And the number of posts in that forum is continually increasing with very few tools to actually surface useful and interesting content – like what witnesses think, and the issues that I might think are important and help me determine whether I want to vote for them or not.
In that sense, it's not my job to go out and interview all the possible witnesses. That silly. That is actually beyond silly – it is completely ludicrous. That cannot be the expected operation of this community, because it puts too heavy a burden on the average community member to make good and important decisions about governance.
Yes, you all may be in a multitude of different places. And you all may respond to something that pops up in front of one of you.
But that's not my job. That's your job.
It's your job as witnesses to convince us, the community, that you should continue to be witnesses – that you should continue to get our votes. It's your job to convince us that you do a good job. At least if you want to continue receiving those votes.
This is a problem with expectation and there is only one possible outcome – that the witnesses do not actually represent what the voters would like them to do. That's not the fault of the voters. That's not the fault of the community. I would be willing to lay it at the foot of the original implementers who didn't see fit to make educating the community something they considered important when it comes to the issue of the import of votes. (And, to be completely fair, a whole lot of important things about the STEEM blockchain. That's an entirely different rant.)
It's a bit disingenuous to suggest that a post which goes out of its way to invite witnesses in and has already elicited more concentrated feedback than most of the circle jerk that goes on around here is less likely to be important to the witnesses than J Random Stemian dropping a line or popping up on Steemit.chat.
That can't be what you are implying, right? It absolutely can't be. Because that would be silly and at direct odds with what you've already said.
I want to get an idea of who the witnesses are, and I don't want to have to be the one that pretends to be a news agency and does all the hard work of interviewing you. There's not enough in it for me.
But @swolesome does. I'm inclined to let him. I'm also inclined to stand by whatever content he turns up as a result.
How is that not a good idea for me?
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Given that he could have literally copy/pasted the list with 100% accuracy, I'd argue that right there calls this methodology into question.
You do you, boss. I'm not saying this is a bad idea. I'm saying that using this as the only metric for who you vote for is short-sighted and misses the mark. Does it benefit witnesses to engage with the community? Of course. I'd love for you to point to where I suggested otherwise. I do to the greatest extent possible. I'm always around in the various forums that I invest my time in.
What myself and others are saying is that, if you care about voting for witnesses, this being your only metric gives you an utterly incomplete picture of who is doing what. I have a thousand different things going on, and I'm far from being the busiest witness in the top 100. Given our time and energy are supremely limited by our responsibilities, it's not incumbent on us to hunt down every post that might reference any of us and reply to it.
Hell, you could just check out the #witness-category tag and peruse the postings. It'd be little different than what this post hopes to accomplish, and you'd have direct access to the most active witnesses on the chain, rather than waiting for them to respond to a post they might not even be tagged in.
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I think the question is do you have an obligation to be engaged with the community. I think the answer should be obvious. An account with no engagement and is the in top 100 ( not saying you have no engagement ) smells of something odd imho.
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Well of course. The issue I have with relying on this on its own is that I engage with the community in my own particular capacities. I'm open to conversation, but I have various projects and people I'm heavily involved with. I only have a limited amount of time and energy.
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You do recognize that "this being the only metric that you go by" is a strawman argument that you guys introduced. It's not even present in the original posting. It's entirely synthetic.
Saying "you can see the results of this and decide what to do with your vote" is not, pointedly not, the same as saying "use this and only this to decide what to do with your vote." The difference between those two things cannot be invisible to you.
Every metric – including all of the ones that you guys have put forward – provides an utterly incomplete picture of who is doing what. The problem with your suggestions is that they put the onus of getting what you want on the populace of voters, with the subtle implication (or not-so-subtle) that you are entirely too busy as a group to care about campaigning for all of those tiny minnow votes that you say are so important to you.
Yes, I said "campaigning."
Repeatedly, it's been said that voters should be careful with their vote and only vote for people who share their vision and their plan for the future. Okay, I want to take you at your word. I believe that we want to take you at your word.
But if I take you at your word, I have to wonder – and I mean this wholeheartedly – why the group of you haven't done something like this post on your own initiative, providing a weekly or biweekly post under a specific blog entry as a new account, where everyone is invited to see and read witness responses to questions which are chosen from the previous week or two that witnesses have seen floating around in the community. After all, we are supposed to believe that your active in the community and thus will have seen questions which come up repeatedly?
But you haven't done that. Not only that, you show active hostility to the idea.
Why is that?
This could've been a vast nonissue a year ago, if someone had said, "hey, votes are important, I'd like to take up the mantle of the local broadcast news agency and arrange town halls where the community can interact with interested witnesses!" And then, instead of taking it is an imposition or as an insult that you might be question, the witnesses might have simply taken it as an opportunity, built a forum (in the classic sense), and avoided seeming like they want to have the role of aristocracy without even the chance of the rabble gathering outside their walls.
Optics. Basic optics.
You can see why people who you (witnesses) have said out right are very tiny fish indeed but may be important in aggregate because they're less likely to be swayed by whimsy might want to be treated like that. They might want to see you act like you actually believe that.
We, too, only have a limited amount of time and energy – and a limited amount of the ability to care.
You guys are really working hard to make that last point the most important one.
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You mean like @lexiconical does with his Meet the Witnesses series? You seem to be coming to this conversation underprepared to defend your points. Since you brought up the topic of optics, how's it look when you bemoan the fact no one took it upon themselves to be a "new agency" for witnesses when someone (and not just him) have already done so? Due diligence.
We're all adults here. If you want to engage in a conversation on a topic, the best course of action is to inform yourself about the topic. Knowledge is an irreducible human good. Being informed is never a bad thing, and should be encouraged, but that requires initiative on the individual seeking information as well as the individual providing the information.
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Here's the funny thing – I absolutely have been working surprisingly hard to inform myself about the topic. It's almost as if the system is set up to deliberately keep people from finding out about the topic. Aggressively. Consciously.
Other people have already pointed out that the blockchain and its hard forks themselves are woefully under-documented, but let me tell you that as a relative newcomer to this particular social platform – trying to learn anything about it coherently, cogently, and meaningfully? Almost impossible.
At best you can stumble over a thread like this where people actually get actively engaged. Maybe some aspect of the constantly raging Steemit drama falls across your screen and you can chase one little bit of it.
But if you had money, that would not be the way to bet.
Given the theoretical importance of witnesses, why is there no platform-promoted information on it? Why is it that you guys react with aggressive engagement when something like this comes up?
You didn't start with, "we've already been answering these questions over on Meet the Witnesses, maybe you should check it out." This, nine or so levels deep in the responses, is the first time it's come up. Someone of a cynical bent might suggest that it's the first time that you thought about it or remembered that it exists.
If it didn't come up until now, how important could it be?
You're the one pushing the idea that everyone else needs to be educated on why they should or shouldn't vote for you as a witness and that it's their responsibility, not yours, to convey that knowledge. If you really believed that, your opening response would've been "… and you can find that information over here at…"
But that's not what you did. That's not what you've been doing.
So yes, we're all adults here and we are old enough to recognize a disingenuous tactic when we see it.
You still seem to be laboring under the belief that it is everyone else in the community's responsibility to find out about you and not at all your responsibility to persuade the community that you are worth finding out about, including making doing that easy.
I'm not going to take the blame for that. That's ridiculous.
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Really? You've been laboring to do that? That's funny, as I came to this platform with no prior knowledge about how blockchains operate, and I've managed to educate myself just fine. I looked up and read what I could get my hands on. I sought out people to ask questions on chat. I engaged in comments. I took initiative.
Why didn't I mention @lexiconical before? It didn't occur to me until you brought up this notion of a central news person. However, it wouldn't have taken more than a few minutes' search, so I ask again: why were you so plainly uninformed? For someone claiming to labor at being informed, you're not doing a particularly good job. @jerrybanfield was lambasted to the Moon for putting himself into a similar position, so don't think I'm just picking on you.
How much easier do I need to make it for people to find me? I post regularly, I'm involved across a fair range of Discord servers with different audiences, and I am a regular member of more than one podcast. What more do you need? An email from me every week?
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This is the last reply I'm going to make in this discussion thread, since it's been beat to death.
Active witnesses are around to answer questions and engage with users. Most post regularly and engage in the comments section. Witnesses can be identified using Steemit's own witness voting page or by the use of other platforms like Steemdb or steemd. Those of us who do more than just run a server are spread around a wide array of avenues where users can interact with us.
Conversely, users should take the time and effort to look up as much information as they can. Be informed. Read the whitepaper and and use the search (as cringey as it is) to look up article posts about topics. Seek out chat rooms and Discord servers; there not secretive or hidden anywhere. There is an enormous wealth of information available to anyone who wants to seek it out, and there are plenty of witnesses to answer questions about things that a user may not understand or may have a problem with.
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