I've said many times it is important to vote for witnesses, because they keep the Steem blockchain functioning.
There are many criteria you can use to vote for a witness. They can be categorized by:
- their technical expertise and capacity to keep their witness node running smoothly, perhaps even help others lacking the skills to get out of trouble
- witnesses with top DApps or tools contributed to the ecosystem
- community-driven witnesses
- witnesses who primarily fight abuse
- witnesses-ambassadors
- a combination of the above
Sometimes a vote has a high doze of personal bias, even disregarding a rational reason for it. But when voting for witnesses, it is important to be well-informed.
From a technical perspective, one of the high indicators of a good or bad witness is their missing blocks.
Every 3 seconds a new block is produced, and missing blocks make the blockchain less smooth and stable.
So, it's a good indicator to keep track of when we vote for them.
I've noticed two distinct ways this information is presented in different tools. Qne perspective is offered in @steemchiller's awesome tool SteemWorld.org, where the missing blocks are showed as a percent like in the image below:
That is at the bottom of the page, after you log in, look for the Tools tab.
Another view you can find on @drakos' steemian.info/witnesses tool, where you can see the missed blocks as numbers, but color coded, as in the image below:
Both sets of data seem to be based on witnesses' missed blocks during the last week (or the last 7 days), but it's not specified anywhere. This means the information is relevant to recent activity of the witnesses.
That's one aspect I'm interested in when I approve / disapprove witnesses, and I check them out regularly.
If you don't want to be bothered with these details, you can always set me (@gadrian) as a proxy witness, and all my choices will become yours. You can see how you can do that in this post. Beware, you will lose all your previous witness approvals when you set a proxy.