Alright folks, I'm going to try to keep this one as simple & direct as possible, with hyperlinks to more in-depth discussions... because we need to cover a lot of ground.

There's going to be people reading this who have never used Hive yet, ones who have been here for years but never voted for a witness, and (I'm guessing) quite a few people who haven't voted for witnesses since the Justin Sun fiasco...

But more on that later....

The focus here is on Hive Witnesses. What they are, what role they play, how they are chosen, the current status of the "top 20" thus Hive as a platform, and a few simple calls to action.

Table of Contents

What Are Witnesses
The Current Status of the Top 20 - and thus Hive
What, that witness is actually who?
Calls to Action
Finding Information on Witnesses
A Moment of Clarification
Recommended Witness List
The Simple Option

What Are Witnesses?

Simply put, witnesses are the block producers on the Hive blockchain (like miners on BTC/XMR), except that governance isn't weighted by hashing power, but by the amount of stake (Hive Power) which approves of a particular witnesses.

The more HP voting for a witness, the higher they go in the rankings.

The top 20 are the consensus/governance witnesses.

Code is law, and those 20 decide the code.

Sure seems like it's important that we all carefully vote for witnesses, right?

Well, yes and no - because it's stake-weighted, folks with lots of HP (or $ to buy HP) get to vote a LOT more than you or I do.

There's multiple accounts on this blockchain with many millions of Hive Power.

That's a hefty vote.

Between my own and all that proxied to me, I vote for ~ 190,000 HP...

What's your vote worth?

To be clear, I'm not saying that the sum of little votes don't add up - quite the opposite. It's more that I'm emphasizing the gap in voting power here, thus just how important it is for little fish to come together if we're going to have an impact in a lake run whales.

The Current Status of Hive & The Top 20

How many of you have changed your witness votes since the hostile takeover of the Steem blockchain?

The community had a massive get out the vote campaign - focused on supporting the previous, actually community chosen, top 20.

We all came together, as a community, for the purposes of fending off a shared enemy in Justin Sun, Tron, and the newly purchased StInc, and we were able to hold them off for a while, before forking into HIVE.

In the 21 months since that happened, most of the top 20 have stayed in the Top 20.

Now, we're at a pretty pivotal moment for Hive, with a handful of whales, including two Top 20 witnesses, are abusing their power - maliciously down-voting content for political reasons, systematically driving multiple users to negative reputation, and gaslighting (publicly, with lies that are often later admitted to) those who call them out.

The handful of accounts that are mostly responsible for almost all of this down-voting are: curangel, ocdb / ocd-witness, altleft, azircon, acidyo, and smooth (mostly just on content about the problem), and newsflash in there occasionally as well.

Here are some posts about the topic - some with hundreds of comments:

What, that witness is actually who?

Now, as I mentioned before, there are two Top 20 witnesses who are leading the charge on this campaign:

First up is pharesim a top 20 witness, who happens to have started the curangel project. Curangel has thus far refused to address the activity, so it is unknown who is actually doing this downvoting - but I've heard rumors that azircon has the keys as well.

Next up is ocd-witness, another top 20, run by ocdb, which is run by acidyo. OCDB has also refused to make a statement about who is doing this down-voting, or why, but King Acid has said plenty... unfortunately most of it is outright lies and admitted "shit talking."

Calls To Action

The post is really starting to get long now, and I haven't even started in on the witness list itself... so I'll just lay out some quick, potential, calls to action right quick.

Remove votes for witnesses whose actions, behavior, and political motives you don't support. For me, the big ones here were: ocd-witness, pharesim, smooth.witness (all explained up above) - I'm currently in the process of deciding how to categorize witnesses who support folks like this. I'm trying not to vote for any that do, but I don't know that I should really call them out in the same way.
Remove your delegations & curation trail follows from ocdb and curangel. By lending them your stake, you are pretty explicitly supporting these activities.
Vote for other witnesses! Some priorities to think about = folks not in the top 20, people who openly & clearly advocate for free speech, people who don't lash out like juveniles when questioned about their use of their power, etc.
3a. If the parts about researching & choosing witnesses seem like too much, there's a Simple Option down at the bottom.
Start exploring more of the 2nd layer projects on Hive, like #ProofofBrain, #SPKNetwork, #LEOFinance, the upcoming project from #informationwar / #deepdives, and more.
Just have realistic expectations of Hive - while the tech side of Hive may be some of the best in existence, the inherent flaw of dPo$ means it can never live up to the dream. Don't worry, a handful of us are working on a new project, building off Hive's code, but with a fair launch, no buying/selling stake, and a whole bunch of other experimentation to keep moving this ball forward.

Finding Information About Witnesses

It's important that we practice informed consent, that we make conscious decisions, based on weighing the pros & cons, comparing the options.

While I do break down my own choices for witnesses (and recommendations from others) down below, I'm not asking you to blindly follow me, or anyone else.

This is a public blockchain, and you can see everything these witnesses are doing, and who supports them (and who they support.) Besides the obvious of just looking at their account(s)

Basics on Peakd

As usual, @peakd makes it easy as can be to find out who someone is voting for (or if they aren't voting), but I believe you have to hop over to hiveblocks.com to see who they are proxying their vote to, if they are.

All you have to do to see this info on peakd, is pick it from the interactions menu on someone's profile, or add "/witnesses" to the address of their blog.

For example: @kennyskitchen/witnesses

You can also find more information about witnesses in general, and specifically, at https://peakd.com/witnesses - and vote there as well.

Although, it isn't nearly as informative as:

Arcange's Awesome Tool

Big thanks to @arcange for creating such this awesome tool: https://hive.arcange.eu/witnesses/, and thanks to @truthforce for showing it to me!

With this tool, we can see how many accounts & how much stake is voting for each witness, movement (presumably last 24h or 7d), who their voters are, price feed, their links, and a TON more data.

Here is a peek, the current snapshot of the top 22:

Yes, I chose the top 22 for a reason - because #21 and #22 are both folks I would very much like to see up in the top 20

Why does it matter?

Through this, anyone can easily see who is supporting a witness, thus allowing for a much higher level of informed freedom of association.

If there is a witness that you actively don't support, and another witness you do is supporting them, then perhaps it's time to withdraw support there as well, or at least have a conversation with them (if possible.)

As @logiczombie put it so well...

The funny thing is that I actually have supported many of these witnesses who down-voted me over the years, either because I thought it was just a one-off thing, or because (as I mentioned before) I wasn't being dilligent enough with my votes for a while there.

Well, the emergency of Justin Sun taking over is long since passed, and I've been updating and shuffling my witness votes quite a lot over the last few months.

A Moment of Clarification

If you don't see any problem with any of the things discussed & linked to above, or just don't care at all about the governance, community, and life of Hive - that's just fine. This post isn't for you.

If you want to scream at me now and pretend that I'm a "crazy conspiracy theorist" and that there's definitely nothing to see, while simultaneously 100% down-voting this post - that's just fine too. This post isn't for you, it's just largely about you.

Recommended Witness List

I promised y'all a short post... and we're not really pulling that off... But it's important to hit all these points, because even this post barely scratches the surface. There are so many posts and comments sections to read, so much transaction history to look through, just to really know what's going on.

That said, here is a list of witnesses that I feel comfortable recommending. @Ura-soul recently put out this post looking for more free-speech witnesses to vote on, and besides his descriptions of people, I and others also left plenty there in the comments. For this section I'm just going to stick with a very simple list, starting at the highest rated folks:

ausbitbank (#2)
steempeak / peakd (#6)
yabapmatt (#11)
stoodkev (#17)
quochuy (#19)
someguy123 (#20)
aggroed (#22)
threespeak (#24)
drakos (#29)
timcliff (#32)
apshamilton (#49/47)
r0nd0n (#52/50)
enginewitty (#55/53)
disregardfiat (#57/54)
ura-soul (#63/67)
pizza.witness (#69/63)
shmoogleosukami (#94/80)

Obviously, I'm voting for more than this - I have all 30 of my witness votes used, but these are the ones that seem like the strongest choices - some of my others I don't necessarily know enough about to recommend them, per se.

Please let me know if you've got a favorite freedom-focused witness, or many, that I missed!

The Simple Option

If you are someone who really doesn't care to dive into all of this, especially if you don't have all that much voting power anyway, you can also proxy your vote to someone else. Simply go to their blog page on peakd, click interaction, and you'll see the option to set them as your witness proxy.

Your HP is then lumped in with theirs, and anyone else proxying them, for witness votes.

Note, while this is similar to delegation, the two are separate. Delegation gives the use of your HP for voting on posts & comments, while proxying gives the use of your HP for voting on witnesses (and I believe proposals - but I may be wrong.)

If you would like to proxy your witness votes out, and are interested in supporting anarchists, free-speech-lovers, and a more decentralized Hive, you can proxy it to me. You can see my current votes up above, and I'm always open to adjusting as I find new information.

When was the last time you checked your witness votes? Was it the Steem/Hive hard fork? Or Never?