^ I second @jasonshick's comment.
I have continued to vote for you because I know you do stuff behind the scenes, but a lot of the community is not really aware of what goes on behind the scenes. I think that doing regular witness reports is an important part of being a witness, because it helps everyone know what you are up to. In addition to helping to promote you, it also does the service of educating the community about what the witnesses are up to, and clearing the misconception that the top witnesses are just sitting around producing blocks :)
I don't believe it's that easy really. Getting to the top is all about whale votes, and these are too often political.
Neither making the rpc node a publicly available cluster nor steeminvite changed anything about my drop down, actually the first time I dropped out was just a few days after releasing the latter.
I agree. It's not as easy as news alone.
It isn't, and that's for certain. On the other hand, user engagement creates name recognition. And reputation in the form of name recognition goes a very long way to securing your position.
Preaching to the choir my friend. But even as well known as I am on the platform, and with the humanitarian aid project everyone loves at first sight, I don't have a pocket full of back-slapping whales and old school buddies to make things happen, and the people that support, en masse, pretty much don't add up to a whale by themselves in total. So you can get name recognition all day, get a couple hundred witness votes and still go no where, because you aren't in the "circles" that move things. Someone like @timcliff is a total outlier who has gotten where he is on sheer hard work, contributions and a ceaseless presence. Outside of him, and a few top wits who have really SOLID contributions to the network for ALL to use, there is definitely a club at the top that is very very hard to break into at this point without a ton of imported money or some serious asskissing politics. And I'm not bitter, not in the slightest. I was ON that path and could have stayed on it, I just hated how filthy dirty it felt, and I'm much happier now climbing back up on merit rather than bullshit boosts from people who loved to use my name for profit but when it came down to brass tacks had zero real loyalty to principle and 100% loyalty to money and their precariously built positions.