I do have a bit of understanding about the governance in general. How the top 20 process the blocks and makes sure Hive runs smoothly. When I say I don't know much about the witnesses, I meant that individually. Let's take you for example. Your description is very vague:
I have seen your name come up a lot though as someone who is good at programming and who people respect. You are also the one behind the Return Proposal, and top 3 in witnesses. But I still didn't know what you do. Looking at your posts, you seem to be the one handling the backend programming of Hive itself, and works on the forks and updates. But I had to look at the titles of your post individually. I don't really see myself checking each and every one of the witnesses out. So I just look at their descriptions.
Since I now know a bit about what you do, I voted on you, but I wish witnesses would improve their descriptions. Some don't even have anything written.
Yeah, I know, that's the hard part.
Witnesses back in the days were expected to run a seed node, aside from their own witness infrastructure. They were also expected to write semi-weekly #witness-update's in #witness-category and that didn't worked well because there were basically two kinds of people, those who were writing cool stories, and those who didn't had time for that because they were working their backend off for the platform.
Please note that this witness description isn't something that could be used for anything more than a catch phrase.
Witnesses uses various communication channels, my preference is an open source, community hosted rocket.chat instance that runs at OpenHive.Chat (see: #witness channel). While instance isn't that popular than it used to be, but we used to use #witness channel for interaction with witnesses, and some of us volunteered on #help.
PS
Being top 3 is relatively new to me and quite sad actually, but it is what it is ;-)
I see. I didn't even know openhive.chat existed haha. I do think that the whales and those with big stake do a good job of voting for witnesses. If they have more stake in Hive, then they will want to research more into things as well.