I've been looking at my witness list lately between what's been going on and some of them saying they weren't going to run their node anymore. While the witness voting is weighted by how much SP you hold, like @pfunk said, the sum of many smaller votes do add up and can have an effect, especially in the bottom ranks of the top 19.
While weighted, this is a major way for the community at large to express their views on what changes are approved and to some degree the direction the site takes (since accepting a hard fork requires enough votes from witnesses.)
However, along these lines, I would like to gain a better understanding of how each witness views various issues and their own vision of things. While I've not clicked through every one on the list as of yet, so far the witness threads I've seen are haven't been updated in a while and I'd personally like to see this change.
If it's helpful to add to the list of explaining witness stuff, I made a post months back on it specifically for the mentor group I was a part of at the time:
https://steemit.com/witness/@sykochica/what-s-a-steem-witness-and-why-should-we-care
This was before the economic changes kicked in, so the numbers are definitely out of date which also changes certain aspects of the criteria included in there, but I do think many of the concepts still hold true.
If interested, my witness votes can be seen on [my steemd profile,] but again I do expect these to be changing (at least slightly) in the near future as I think things over.
I wanted to edit this in here. Timcliff has and still does a great job to help provide us with updates from witnesses into a more consolidated place. His latest post on witness reports can be viewed here as well as a history of these under the tag reportsfromthewitnesses.
You can also follow witness updates in general through the witness-category tag.
Thank you for this, I have read your post and voted but can't reply. Why is there so many members wanting to be witnesses when there is a top 15 . Can I add this link to my post, juts think its so much easier having all the links together getting all the information people need :)
Yea, I think comments aren't allowed after an amount of time (which may be changed with an future hard fork.) To answer your question:
Technically it's the top 19. Witness are paid for each block they produce. Every 'round' which is over 63 seconds, there are 21 blocks that are created. From these 21 blocks, each of the top 19 witnesses are guaranteed be assigned to create 1. One is assigned to a miner in the mining queue (so this gets spread around between those that sign up for this...I believe.) The remaining block gets assigned to a backup witness that is outside of the top 19, so they don't get one every round. However the more witness votes (proportionally) determines how often that backup witness will be selected for that extra block. Hence the person at witness rank 20 will get the block more often than a person ranked 35 (of course assuming the don't have the same weighted witness votes, which I've never seen happen and doubt will happen.)
Yep, feel free to use the link. Hope it's helpful...I'd just recommend a disclaimer that the specific numbers are off (i.e. how much witnesses make) since pre-dating the economic changes. I did edit it the post at the time with the comments that were given to make it as correct as possible for the time.
Thank you that helps. I have added the link saying the numbers may have changed. Thanks again :)