Your vote does matter (but only when you can use it properly)

State of Golos (from my perspective as a witness)

"When you elect a clown, expect a circus"

How does it look like 48 hours after HF17?

On the list of 100 witnesses sorted by approval, there are top 19 spots for so called "active" witnesses that are scheduled every round for a block production.
Their role is crucial for the Golos security and reliability.
Witnesses are chosen to be the guardians of the consensus and reliable block producers.
A good thing is, that there's a really high approval for "active" witnesses, starting with exceptional 36.78% approval for @arcange (congratulations on that!).
As a comparison, on the Steem platform, top1 witness @jesta has less than 20% approval.
On Golos, even the lowest rank among top19 witnesses - @litrbooh - has more votes supporting him than top1 on Steem.
That is really great and I wish we will achieve that on Steem someday.

But that's all of the good news here.

6 among active witnesses have outdated price-feeds and nobody seems to care about that, not to mention that outside of top19 is even worse.

Why you, as a Golos user should care about that?

Because you are voting for them and you should expect them to do their job right.

Outdated price-feeds can affect your payouts and in the long run GOLOS/GBG prices, not to mention its reputation as a currency.

Another issue is that within top100 voted witnesses, there are only 40 that are capable of block production.
On Steem, there are 82.
That number itself wouldn't be a problem, 40 reliable block producers is enough for a healthy platform.
Unfortunately, that combined with the fact that significant amount of them are unable to provide a price feed,
or that disproportion among 20 runner-up witnesses is over 42x (on Steem less than 3x), makes this whole situation alarming.
And I'm not even analyzing amount of decentralization, i.e. case when one entity is running more than one block producer.

Yes, I know, I'm complaining a lot.
But it looks really bad.

What might surprise you, is that it is not a fault of witnesses!

It's the users who failed to enforce high quality standards and are voting for witnesses regardless of their engagement.
Or not voting at all.

Use your Golos, make a good choices while voting for witnesses

Approve those witnesses that you think are worth it.

Which of them are? You have to decide by yourself.

• Make sure you are not voting for those witnesses who are disabled for a long time (greyed out). It would be a waste of your vote.
• Make sure you are not voting for those with outdated price feed, although sometimes it might be just a temporary issue.
• Check their "witness url", usually it should lead you to their introduction page when you can get more info about them.
• Try to find out what they are doing for Golos as a platform. Sometimes that might not be obvious.
  Not always the most talkative guys are best for the platform when it comes to maintaining infrastructure, but also just a running a witness node might not be enough.
  Check if they are providing seed nodes. Maybe API nodes? Maybe running other services? Maybe involved in development or spreading a word about Golos?

It the end it is up to you. You are part of Golos and you are Golos stakeholder.

Use your own voice wisely!