I suspect you won't get too much valuable feedback from many on this platform regarding your witness campaign. But, because I believe that you guys mean well, I would like to share some of my personal thoughts on this matter.
Granted, these conclusions are mine and because I'm not the owner of the absolute truth, they should be taken with a grain of salt.
- As much as there are a lot of technical knowledge involved in running a witness server, the political aspect of it is probably undeniable.
- Most Stake Holders that Hold an Amount to move the ranks are voting for dead Witnesses intentionally. Possibly waiting for the right Witness to show up, possibly because they believe the current Ranking is the most beneficial to Steem's Ecosystem. To believe however that they are not voting on witnesses because they don't know that they have votes tied up into dead accounts is highly, highly improbable.
- All Aspiring Witnesses seem to need a big project to back them up, something to show for to gain the support of the Stake holders that matter. Running Steemit.Chat in my opinion did wonders for FollowBTC and CrimsonClad, but they had worked like Santa's elves for months without making any profits.
- As much as its not a requirement to be community oriented as a witness, its probably the most sustainable way of garnishing support. Meaning, to belong, participate of an established community or to possibly start your own.
- A possible route for a successful Witness campaign could be straight up development for the blockchain. This however has to be extremely impressive, the creation of a dapp that solves actual shortcomings of this platform. (nothing against games and fun, but meme apps probably wont do).
Best of luck!
Hi @meno, thanks for taking the time providing your feedback !. Indeed, there are a lot of factors at play many of them you described very well. Part of the reason we started as a team was to combine both the social/community part with the more technical aspect of developing new tools and running a stable witness.
Thank you @meno, as Pablo says we agree that there needs to be a mix between community building / social on one hand and technical skills on the other hand.
I'm not so sure about voting intentionally for dead witnesses ... maybe there is some of that too, but it cannot be only that.
We started not long ago but we plan indeed to take up some serious projects as well as expand the community. Let's see how we manage !
Steem on!
At the expense of possibly irritating someone, I distinctly remember @blocktrades writing a long time ago (it would be a mission to find this comment) that leaving his spots open, voting on dead accounts was intentional and for the reasons I wrote above too. Now, is this the case for all whales? probably not, but I would not be surprised in the slightest if most subscribe to this strategy.
I'm not saying this in an accusatory way, not in the slightest. It actually makes sense to me, if we think about the fact that a top tier witness is standing to make a pretty penny maintaining the network, making the decision to support a new one has to come with the least amount of faith possible.
Allow me to submit to you an example of someone who was not vetted properly, yet with his "charisma" managed to run a successful witness campaing, @zeartul and his @bellyrub (and the bank). He collected thousands of Steem as a witness ranked in the 30's, if memory serves me right, only to pull an exit scam that rivals the bitconnect types.
Hence my sympathy with the big whales on the issue. I think a new witness in my opinion will be put through the paces, he or she will have to demonstrate to the big Stake holders that he or she is willing to stick it through even when the price of steem wont cover the costs of being a witness. It's almost as an endurance test... they make you walk on the coals if you will.
Grant you I'm being a tad ridiculous, but I don't think I'm way off... quite the opposite.
Well, when you start from very low as we did it's pretty clear that it's not about the reward. We've provisioned a server for a year before having any idea of whether the rewards would cover our costs. Someone around the 115 rank in the active witness list would not be covering our server costs (let alone cover the time spent). We would need to climb up to around place 60 to approach break-even when only half the time spent (Pablo's because one can claim that I would be blogging anyway, with or without the witness) is included. So looking at it from the get go it is clearly a lousy business to start a new witness, if it had been for the money we wouldn't have even tried.
thats a healthy attitude @sorin.cristescu, the challenge becomes then to project this to the blockchain, to the stake holders effectively...
How to make the right amount of noise, enough to be visible, not too much to be annoying... Hence the politics aspect of it all.
:)
Being a Steem witness is no more about witness server than astronomy is about telescopes. :-)
Spot on. This is precisely why I thought it's about time for a "non telescope specialist" type of astronomer to step on the scene. Most of our current "top 20" (or should I say top 50) are telescope specialists. In the beginning it was the only thing that was needed. But if this eco-system has not yet outgrown that phase, it will, soon enough. And then the value provided by a contemporary astronomer in conjunction with a state of the art telescope built by someone else will become apparent.