This doesn't even read as politics. Politics attempts to make promises to one group at the implicit expense of another. What Ned has said here is essentially devoid of promise and without real direction. When politicians engage in this sort of presentation, they rightly get lambasted by both those who of traditionally supported them and those who oppose them.
This is supposed to be business, not politics. In business, we communicate clearly with the market, offer them what they want, and have a plan for doing it tomorrow.
Witnesses are elected? That means politics.
Elected and selected – but Steemit Inc. aren't witnesses, at least openly. They have gone out of their way to avoid being seen running a witness node directly under their control, probably sensibly as a means to avoid the accusation of double dipping, both controlling the majority stake by a vast amount and taking a part of the inflationary value of the reward pool which is allocated in accordance with the stake in that reward pool. That's not to say that they are absolutely not behind one or more of the top 20 witnesses, but they are at least smart enough not to be so completely obviously.
But you bring up a fine point. The witnesses are elected. We are not talking about witnesses – we're talking about the company that owns the majority stake in the steem blockchain, the company that has the most to lose should it remain unprofitable, the company which pushed hardfork 20 containing obvious and major design flaws, who continue to not have a clear statement of where they want to take the project or what they intend to do with it, and who specifically avoid being responsible by not running a witness.
Steemit Inc. cannot be voted out. Steemit Inc. is not beholden to votes or to politics. They have mathematics on their side, as defined in the very white paper that describes the blockchain.
If @ned is pretending to act like a politician, he's doing a absolutely crap job of it. Like I said, politics attempts to make promises to one group at the implicit expense of another. The function of witnesses is ostensibly to be responsible for making sure that computational and replication nodes for the steem blockchain database are up and running at all times. In theory, they should also be responsible for checking any new software deployments to that database, possessing the technical acumen in and of themselves or be willing to spend some of the resources which they get as a result of being witnesses on the blockchain on expert personnel who can do that. The failure of which is why hardfork 20 was such a debacle.
But if we look at what the witnesses go out of their way to sell themselves with – it's political. It has nothing to do with technology aside from, one way or another, getting a steem node running on the system somewhere that can keep up with current traffic. Everything else is, in fact, political. Convincing us that they have the best interests of the blockchain at heart, persuading us that they give more of themselves to the blockchain than "the other guy," alongside kissing hands and shaking babies.
Witnesses are political. The votes for witnesses are political, sometimes being a literally handshake exchanges reeking of "you scratch my back and I'll scratch yours."
But Steemit Inc., again in theory, not being witnesses and not being beholden to any part of that architecture, instead simply being the root and prime mover of that architecture, have only one purpose in this whole thing:
Business.
Not politics.
I realize this may be hard to grasp for some people but it is terribly and completely obvious. Not only that, it's important to understand and to be able to make good judgments going forward about investment, time sink, and what we can and should expect of Steemit Inc. and the steem blockchain in the face of a very diminished crypto-commodity market and increasing competition from what has to be said to be better social media ecologies.
People interested in that deserve better than bad political pablum.