Apologies in advance if this is not relevant for #HiveDevs community, I Am uncertain of what community to use.

I recently came back to the Hive platform with a lot of love and most of all regret for not really sticking around since the start of Hive. Something changed in the South African community of Hivers and now, upon returning I realized a lot of the South African account are pretty inactive, including a few big accounts that got curated daily, for ex. @jaynie (if you are still out there and kicking please leave a comment.) and a few others. Now I myself don't know what could have caused this, but it got me thinking about the platform, the benefits, the downsides, why people join and why they "leave" ultimately. Somehow I remember the hive keychain add-on prompting me to choose witnesses, it was around December last year if I am not mistaken. Might have been longer ago.

When I was prompted to choose witnesses I really didn't give much thought to it. It might have been stupidity or incompetence or just the general greed factor every person faces, you know not really giving a sh@t about anything other than making money off the hive platform. Without hesitation I just clicked random witness names and went on with my life, not evening caring about what affect that could have on the platform in general, or if some of them had abusive thoughts in mind. Even though I did vote for some great witnesses I also chose a lot of inactive witnesses (Only realizing that as of the last week).

What good is a vote on an "INACTIVE" witness or even an active witness that adds no value to the hive blockchain, might as well leave your vote open then.

While writing this post I spoke to @meesterboom and also @erikah about this problem and that I would like to "Scrap" and "Revise" my witness list in order to enable more valuable witnesses, to have a more powerful and more valuable input into our beloved Hive Platform/Blockchain. Both of them gave me quite good advice. @erikah wrote a nice post about this Click here to read original post Ultimately the responsibility and choice still falls down on me to choose the correct witnesses. With that being said I am not aware of all the things all of the witnesses do, it is hard to keep track of all of them. However, I left some great curators on my witness list and removed some that I felt (In my opinion) don't add value to the blockchain. You can review these witnesses over here and their activities.

My List of Witnesses

Currently used 16 of my 30 votes.

1 @blocktrades
2 @steempeak
3 @gtg
4 @ausbitbank
5 @arcange
6 @good-karma
7 @yabapmatt
8 @therealwolf
9 @themarkymark
10 @ocd-witness
11 @stoodkev
12 @roelandp
16 @emrebeyler
17 @followbtcnews
25 @threespeak

During this process I removed almost half of the witnesses I had previously voted for with some of them being inactive. I am very content with myself for making a conscious decision to sit my @ss down and remove these votes and re-evaluating my decisions and re-voting for the ones that I personally find adds more value to our blockchain. With that being said I have 14 open votes in which I would allow any input or opinions from any witness or stake holder of HIVE as to who I can vote for and why.

I will personally make a point of it to return and re-evaluate my witness list every 3-6 months.

Even though my Hive stake is small now and not what it use to be I am slowly and surely increasing my hive stake daily with small amounts from my mining rewards that I push into hive every day. I will also try and add a greater lump sum of power each week.

With that being said if you are one of the oaks that just randomly chose witnesses I would recommend revisiting your past choices and revise them, because the fate of our blockchain and its security hangs in the balance of those select few that are chosen to carry the weight!

My Goals Regarding Hive Power.

I use to have a fairly strong account back in the day with my hive power being somewhere around 3500 staked HIVE POWER. With much regret and shame this is not the case anymore and I will have to work hard to reclaim my position at a strong 3000 to 4000 HP. However making it an everyday effort to re-achieve said goal it will take constant determination and a firm mindset in order to get back up again.

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My staked Hive power and delegations.

However small it may be I am still proud of what I achieved in the last month.

My current HIVE POWER being just above 230.6 HP and growing daily.

My current HBD savings at 15.58.

My current delegations are as follows.

@misshugo 30 HP
@ecency 20 HP
@appreciator 20 HP
@ocd 20HP

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The Updates and Editing Corner of my HivePower Situation.

Update on HivePower: Current HP is 471.60 with another 37.27 Hive locked up in savings.

Update on HBD Savings: My HBD savings went up to around 60-ish coins. I withdrew them and planning on staking them on the liquidity pools of splinterlands. So even though its 0 lets say I am at 60.

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Even though its not the biggest of delegations with most of them not even noticing my cut in their stake. I hope for them to increase slowly overtime as I increase my stake into the Hive network.

I also have a few dollars packed into the @splinterlands game, owning a couple of cards and some stake SPS.

Thanks to everyone supporting my blog. Your feedback is always welcome in fact I encourage you to leave your critic in the comments below, positive or negative.