What they are doing independently is of no concern.
What is of concern for everyone who has an account here are proposed changes.
Right now we are mostly voting blind because we have no clue what changes are being proposed or what different perspectives each witness holds.
This leads to a situation where witnesses can (some have been) be bought and paid for.
We need an open forum where these thing are discussed openly without any malicious attacks.
Who will listen to all those voices is anyone who gives a shit about the long term viability of the platform.
Hi @joe.public. I believe we should take interest in what each witness does independently. It really is like an election..say for senate. You vote for the senator based on the individual person but it is only collectively that they can make decisions. The people don’t have a voice in the decisions made at the Senate level, but we do have a voice on who we choose to represent us amongst the group. I don’t know if you are from the US, using our system as an analogy.
Same as witnesses, you should be interested in knowing the beliefs and values of each witness, independently. In the end, there has to be mass consensus amongsts the top witnesses in order to make hard forks and changes with the Steem blockchain. We want to ensure we have the right individuals representing us at that level.
As for the witnesses that you prelude to being bought and sold for, what we can do is take an active approach by not voting for them. Cast our votes to someone who is responsible and is thinking of the long term viability of the platform. To be honest, I truly am tired of writing nowadays. It is exhausting especially since I’ve never been much of a blogger or social media person. So I would rather not spend my limited time on Steemit reading everyone’s thoughts and writing about my opinions. It’s simpler to just take action and vote for witnesses that you believe have the platform’s interest at heart. That being said, you do have to do your own due diligence in researching who you want to support. I can only imagine the opinions being laid out on an open forum arena and too me, they are simply that. Opinions. We all look at different criteria in a witness. I have one witness I admire but he doesn’t care much for another witness I support. So it’s a difference in opinion and not saying he or I are wrong. We just have our own opinions, just like any election.