Today I came across an interesting visual representation of the distribution of votes for the top 50 witnesses.
You can have a more detailed view here.
See that deeper blue at the beginning of the distribution (by vests) for many of the top 50 witnesses? That's @ freedom, the largest single shareholder on Steem, besides Steemit, Inc., and quite a mysterious individual (or group). Actually, you might find it as @ pumpkin, the alt account of @ freedom, which is its proxy for voting witnesses.
The next largest single shareholder account on Steem after @ freedom is @ blocktrades, with about half the stake of @ freedom.
Looking at the image above (which is updated weekly, says on the website), from the Top 20 witnesses, 15 have freedom's vote, 4 have the vote of blocktrades and only one doesn't have the vote of either of them - @ aggroed.
@ aggroed still has a number of whales voting for him, plus - the interesting part - he has the "longest" light blue bar among all witnesses, meaning most approvals from the smaller accounts.
Actually, you can see the light blue bar is quite consistent for most witnesses. That's why you keep hearing every vote is important, no matter how small. While huge stakeholders have proportional influence with their individual stake, a number of smaller stakes put together have a significant influence as well. And you can see it for yourself above.
Now... as I looked at the status of the witnesses I had approved, I surprisingly discovered @oracle-d witness is disabled and has been for a while.
I don't know what happened, didn't find any announcement. They are switched to version 0.22.0 of the blockchain, but the node is disabled, not before missing quite a few blocks.
I did check the history of recent approvals and disapprovals for oracle-d witness with arcange's tool, and it seems a number of big stakeholders decided to disapprove this witness.
Without the desire to check deeper, seeing the node is disabled and that people who probably take informed decisions disapprove it, I followed suite. If you want to know more about witnesses and maybe about this one in particular, you can check out some of the witness chat channels for more info on steem.chat: # witness, # witness-social. Don't join, just read, if you're not a witness nor want to become one.
But there are 716 more accounts voting for @oracle-d witness, among them, in reverse order of vests:
This may be a good opportunity to check your witness list.