I have to admit that chosing who to vote for is not an easy task.
I remember (no, I'm kidding, I looked it up right now on the blockchain) my first set of witnesses I voted for was:
@pfunk, @arhag, @witness.svk and @smooth.witness.
I just knew that they are knowledgable, active and working for the sake of the platform.
Of course: Trustworthy.
That's the most important thing for a witness, but I can't tell that I knew that about them at that time. Trust comes with time.
(They were just bunch of people I've met on the Internet)
While two of them are no longer active I'm happy with my choices.
Back then it was easier to chat with witnesses on a steem.chat (formerly steemit.chat), #witness channel and get a better idea on what they are currently up to or if they are still alive ;-)
We are (some of us) still there, but that place is no longer that crowded (people tend to use various discord servers, and/or other communication channels).
I'm still there, helping @followbtcnews with steem.chat maintenance, my main thing is security/infrastructure wizardry, I'm creator of Steem Pressure series:
I'm not a frequent poster so it's very easy to go through all my posts and see what I was or am doing.
Future? SMT, Communities. It's hard to predict our future, but it's definitely exciting.
(I'm more of a fan of technical side of things: so I'm looking forward at performance improvements, lightweight nodes, etc.)
When it comes to votes, whether up or down, it's not something that's related to a witness job. When we are upvoting or downvoting we are wearing our user hats on. Like everyone else.
Sure, votes (whether up or down) can be abused, and if they can, they obviously are. As we mentioned that multiple times, changes to protocol is not enough, change of culture is also needed.
Bullies or psychos are heavily outnumbered by sane and good people, unfortunately, the former are louder and more annoying.
Thank you @gtg for your feedback