The voting page only allows to vote for people in the top 50 when i tried to enter another name in the box, it failed, several times. So i have 30 votes to use, so what did i do? Like many people will do, i just randomly selected 30 people.  I am not a fan of voting anyhow, do i have to vote? Can i not vote? Would really love the option to turn of my voting rights,  voting never makes anything right, the right people never get into power. 

For example, i did not see your name on the top 50 list, but clearly, if i could of gave all my votes to one person it would be you.  You have the right ethics, but we all know in life, it counts for very little and just like in life, here on Steem, its not what you know, its who you know. 

Very easy to see why the system here is a train wreck and why the price of steem is going to hell. All the good , hard working, HONEST people are leaving because they know they cant beat the powerful whales with the bots.

Keep on trying to beat the system.

You earned(paid for it) your steem power the hard way and if you had a witness I would be voting for it!

> This despite the fact that I have not even a 1/10th of the stake of the downvoters

You have a lot more than 1/10 of my stake and anyway my bot hasn't been reacting to your votes in any way. I can't speak for others.

Thank you so much for all that you have done and are doing to try and make this place better. Not only do you encourage people to create cool content, you are also spreading the word. Thank you! I really hope you are given back your *right* to vote on content you find valuable without having to worry that your vote may lead to the *content creator* being punished.

Respectful, as always.

As the only whale (by my definition, >= 800MVESTS) that is still actively voting with full weight, I wish you go on voting wisely as you have been doing, so I don't have to downvote. Better use my voting power elsewhere. What we're doing, is in the hope of wider reward distribution, to satisfy more users, but less concentration on a few authors. If you think it's threat, so be it.

To get the work done, I have been putting in 12+ hours a day manually (down) voting with zero return, while you can upvote to get some curation rewards, and sometime on your own contents to get author rewards. Please be aware, by voting for yourself, you're not taking money from my pocket, but from the public pool, or say, from other authors' pocket. Yes, it's your stake, you have the right to vote with it as you see fit.

I haven't been to steemfest, so haven't cost anyone's money. But I did donate a few bulks.

Also, same as @smooth said, your stake is more than 1/10 of mine, although it's less than 1/10 of the combination of mine and @smooth's. Just hope you can realize that you have the power. With greater power comes greater responsibility.

I have the chance to sell most of my stake around 3$, but I didn't do it, to give the market less sell pressure. I powered up the @adm account to help @steemcleaners. I converted a lot of my SBD to STEEM at around 15 cents, to help the pegging; when I got the STEEM from the conversion, I powered up most of them. I've never powered down my witness pay after July.

Witnesses are paid to produce blocks, to secure the network, it's nothing to do with voting on the website. There are server costs and man hours and skills required, need to be standby 24x7. If you think we don't worth your vote, it's your right.

By the way, if you want to "attend the whale meeting", please contact @ned.