Not voting for witnesses is a big problem since this blockchain depends on political consensus in the #witness-category.
We suggest making witness-voting mandatory across all classes of steemians to be able to use this blockchain. We believe it will build up a significant culture which we lack on steem as most accounts participate in everything except this.
This became obvious to us after listening to a long list of block validators/witnesses and realizing that this problem would be solved by forced participation.
If you are new on steem and do not know who to vote for, you can use @inertia as witness proxy at https://steemit.com/~witnesses if you do not know who to vote for, or go here https://steemd.com/witnesses to get a more advanced look at the different witnesses, and learn to know them by their blog.
We at @fyrst-witness make sure to always be on consensus, to keep our witness running 24/7 with all the RAM, CPU and fast SSD that is required as STEEM will hit 1 million accounts in a few hours/days.
Not sure that I agree that it should be a mandatory requirement to use the blockchain, but I do think that it should be a much more prominent feature of UIs built on the platform.
I would love to see a big "Cast Your Votes For Witnesses!" message prominently displayed on the header of steemit.com and other sites which allows users to vote and also see information about witnesses/voting/DPoS/etc.
That is OK, we should not agree after 15 minutes.
I am from a country where you do not need to vote, so nobody cares and we have a political environment that is established enough to remain until they retire.
I currently live in a country where voting is mandatory for citizens, this is done so to protect the country by having all eyes on politics which has resulted in more law and order and corrupt politicians and ex presidents in jail.
Right now STEEM runs on the consensus from my homeland, vote if you want or do not vote if you do not want...
I think that in order for me to write to you, I need to vote for at least 5-10 witnesses just to unlock this very feature.
A message saying: You have to vote for witnesses to blog, comment or send a memo with your transaction. Click here.
Pros/Cons?
I think that mandatory voting will just cause people to randomly click on witnesses until they have enough to unlock whatever feature they want to use, which i don't think helps anything, and might even make things worse as @ura-soul pointed out.
I think it's ok, if not better, for people who don't care to not vote. The issue isn't how many people vote, it's how many people care about voting and care who is running the government/platform/whatever that they are a part of.
I like to tackle problems piece by piece instead of making large changes all at once. I think the first and primary problem regarding people voting and caring about witnesses right now is awareness - most people have no idea what witnesses are or that they can even vote for anything.
So I think a good first step is to increase awareness and see how that goes before moving to more drastic measures.
I agree with @yabapmatt that without an increase in understanding of what witnesses do and how to choose one you support, the outcome may not be what an optimist might expect. Just having promo boxes on steemit to prompt people to go read an intelligently (and fairly) written informational page about witnessing with links for users to learn more and learn about the witnesses themselves - would be a great start.
Unfortunately, we can come up with nice ideas all day long but from what I am seeing Steemit Inc. are not particularly focused on delivering them anyway currently.
My suggestion is to maybe start up a profile/movement along the lines of @promo-steem that promotes witnessing to raise awareness. This would not rely on Steemit Inc. agreeing to anything or having to dedicate any resources. Witnesses could come together to upvote posts that promote witnessing in general and the posts would have to be neutral to ensure no one witness gets an unfair advantage.
I agree with @yabapmatt's ideas about not making it mandatory. I also agree with his idea to make it more prominent; the visibility would give more weight to just how important this component is.
yes a agree on the "Cast Your Votes For Witnesses!" message
like me a didn't now the meaning of Witnesses before a did some research on it. a think is a lot ho do not use the vote at all just because they do not know how or way the should
@norwegianbikeman, as a newbie, I didn't know that witness existed until some time later. And when I heard about it, I wasn't sure of whom I'd like to vote for. It took a fair amount of time to find someone to vote for.
Politics is everywhere and lets cast our vote for a good and deserving witness 😊
There is considerable evidence that the fact that the current witness voting page in Steemit only shows the top 50 witness accounts has meant that those top 50 get an unfair boost - see my post on that, here.
Without solving that problem, mandatory voting would just result in the top 50 getting an even higher headstart on everyone else. So far I have heard zero feedback on this problem from anyone who can authorise it to be fixed in Steemit Inc.
I presented an improved witness voting page, here.
If anyone is interested I also suggested a 'vote decay' idea to ensure that old votes have to be renewed for witnesses - meaning that we can't have large stakeholders using the system, voting for witnesses and then never returning. When they do this, the witnesses have a secure position regardless of their behaviour on the platform. They could make the worst possible decisions when it comes to hard forks and no-one could remove them without deliberately investing a large amount of money.
Mandatory witness voting is not a bad idea provided the witness voting situation is made fair.
ye very inporten to use or votes and just if a few of us minnows are using it. its going to matter.
vote on.
Remember this? :D
Yes @fyrstikken, you said absolutely right, every Steemian have 30 slots to vote for witness, so i personally analyse witnesses and try to understand who is more active and who is engaging more because that is really important and it also really effective. And i know you are doing an great work and you are eyeing towards the growth of Steem so i will definitely going to vote for @fyrst-witness. Thanks for sharing and wishing you an great day. Stay blessed. 🙂
Yeah, because tyranny is always better freedumb!
Thanks, @ackza, good to know the big guy still likes to make jokes.
amazing your post, i like it @fyrst-witness
hi! sir how are you?
Thanks @fyrst-witness. I Will Support now. 😘
This post has received a 78.99 % upvote from @booster thanks to: @speedvoter.
If you use STEEM it should be mandatory that you utilize at least 10 votes of 30, and i am currently at 9 myself but looking for others. And i think i found one.
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STOPi voted for you and you might also be vote and follow me.
forced?
perhaps it would be better to find a carrot and not be so quick to use the stick.
If you can't comment to ask questions about witnessing how on earth are you supposed to figure out who to vote for? It's not like there's an easy-to-find resource where the witnesses tell you why they're good at witnessing. Most don't bother doing that anywhere. When Curie clunked out it became clear that a lot of us were voting for Curie because they're Curie and we wanted them to get the rewards, not because we had any idea what their witness process was. And they're hardly alone. It sounds like the witnesses themselves might have a lot more information on how each other operate, but it's not readily available to regular users, much less brand new ones.
Your efforts in promoting voting awareness is a wonderful thing and you should be commended; however forced voting does not have my support. This would only work to aid the top 50 witnesses as uncaring users would vote for the first 30 witnesses to quickly get on the platform.
I really like the idea. So to reward this idea, you will have my witness vote at least until next month (June).
Hi. How are you??? I'm fine thanks. I like your photography post. I like steemit bitcoin news about the money for the blog. Thanks for so much.