Background:
Witnesses play a very important role in the Steemian society and as a result much of their activities have been scrutinized and discussed at length. I have been wanting to write this post ever since I had a chance to see the information on steemstats.com about the witness votes, but the data for this analysis actually comes from steemd.com (as of 3rd November 2017). Since all users on Steemit are encouraged to vote for witnesses, and everyone is allowed 30 votes in total, I wondered how the top 30 witnesses voted.
The Big Picture:
The average number of witness votes casted by the top 30 witnesses was 27.43
This figure would have been very close to 30 if not for @blocktrades and @busy.witness casting less than 10 witness votes. It was also interesting to see a few witnesses not casting their full 30 votes, perhaps saving a couple of spare votes up their sleeves or just not having had time to cast their votes completely.
Of the 823 votes casted by the top 30 witnesses, 23 (2.79%) were unique user accounts not voted by anyone else in the top 30 witnesses, which we can see visually here by the white cells:
To me this appears to suggest that there is reasonable agreement between the top 30 witnesses as to who are trustworthy to be witnesses and not overlooked by other members in the group. Interestingly enough, of those 23 unique votes, 10 were given by @jerrybanfield, which made up one-third of his 30 votes.
Witness popularity amongst themselves:
Of the 823 votes casted by the top 30 witnesses, 498 (60.51%) went to themselves, including votes that they cast to themselves.
The most popular witnesses were @clayop and @abit collecting 25 votes from the top 30 witnesses, and the least popular witnesses were @jerrybanfield and @ihashfury with 7 votes from the top 30 witnesses.
Witness trustworthiness amongst themselves:
I did a quick count and it appeared that 20 out of the 30 witnesses voted for themselves, which is rather interesting because it would seem like they would probably all have voted for themselves to increase their ranking. Something that I also thought would be interesting to look at was the difference between the number of votes that a witness got from the top 30 witnesses and the number of votes that they gave to the top 30 witnesses:
So @blocktrades and @abit received substantially more votes from the top 30 witnesses than they gave votes to the top 30 witnesses (although they both casted less than the 30 votes that they held), while @cervantes and @ihashfury received substantially less votes from the top 30 witnesses than they gave votes to the top 30 witnesses. This is what it looks like visually with the blue cells marking the votes given to the top 30 witnesses.
@clayop was definitely the most trusting of the top 30 witnesses with 25 of his 30 votes going to them, while @jerrybanfield was least trusting of the top 30 witnesses with only 9 of his 30 votes going to them. That means of the 30 witness votes he held, 10 went to users that no one in the top 30 had picked, 11 went to users that at least one other witness in the top 30 had also voted for that were not in the top 30, with the 9 remaining votes actually going to the top 30 (including himself).
I suspect that there might be some interesting variations in the voting patterns between the top 30 witnesses and the next group of ranked witnesses, but hopefully this has given you some food for thought when it comes to the voting behaviour of the top 30 witnesses, and I hope @paulag and @eastmael might be interested in digging a little bit deeper and see where we might be able to go with this analysis (since I need to get back to some #infographics).
Disclaimer: the information used in this analysis and the interpretation of the data are not guaranteed to be 100% accurate, but I have made every effort not to draw conclusions from the results except to highlight insights I have gained from visualizing the information. All comments, suggestions and feedback are welcomed in order to improve the quality of the analysis.
'I am part of a Steemit Business Intelligence community. We all post under the tag #BIsteemit. If you have an analysis you would like carried out on Steemit data, please do contact me or any of the #bisteemit team and we will do our best to help you...