RE: What the fuck do witnesses do?

Ad.1. Actually it's the only thing required. Everything beyond that is extra, which is, of course needed if one wants get actual votes. If a car has a great entertainment system but can't drive, is it still a car?
Ad.2. Which is irrelevant for properly executing witness duties.
Ad.3. You mean those witnesses you call "regime", "rent seeking", or ones who "don’t deserve their top 20 spot but have held it so long" are expected to babysit your witness operations? Still, DAYS before this, in response to your post:

RE: Take Action: Support Active Witnesses on Hive

I wrote exactly this:

A witness's job is to provide security and reliability to the network. They are expected to produce blocks.
I think you are literally missing that.

Discussions in chat evolved days later.

"Open and active discussions about things like this should be widely held and praised for happening."

Cognitive dissonance is strong here. I'm all for raising awareness of how important active governance is, but you wrote a post about witnesses while ignoring fact that your witness wasn't working. If you had done what you were asking for in that post/video, you would've seen for yourself that you shouldn't vote for your own witness because it wasn't doing its job.

You talk about hypocrisy and witness duties. That would be funny if it weren't real, and if it weren't actively hurting the platform that we're building here.

You've ignored my comment about missing blocks, ignored comments in the chat, ignored your infrastructure monitoring (or never it), didn't pay attention to any of the witness voting pages that exist (most of which clearly shows the status of your witness), and ignored all public monitoring services reporting the missing blocks. For days.

"witnesses decided to immediately talk shit"

Missing blocks for days is objective proof of incompetence as a witness. Written on the blockchain.
I'm just a messenger, like the others who pointed that out. Nothing personal; it's just a simple fact written on the blockchain.
The proper witness response would have been to disable the witness and apologize (in that order).

@neoxian, at the same time, was missing blocks. He responded in a few hours, and disabled his witness in less than 10 minutes.

Less than 10 minutes, not more than 10 days. Do you see the difference? Have you seen any drama related to that?

Yet you spent the entire next day to advocate removing votes from us (I guess that's the "widely held and praised for happening" part). While your witness was continuously missing the blocks.

"If someone makes a video like what I did, you get attacked in more ways than one (including having our witness go down shortly thereafter)."

It's not about the video, but about how ironic it is to fail as a witness and post such a video at the same time.
Again, it wasn't attack on you. It was just multiple attempts to make you realize that you weren't fulfilling your witness duties.

What's more intriguing here is that in above quote it seems like you’re implying something even more malicious - that the issues with your witness were not a result of negligence or incompetence, but some sort of coordinated attack?