Well for news about the platform, the important follows are @ned, @sneak, @steemitblog, @steemdevs. If you want to follow the other creator who is no longer part of the project then @dan and @dantheman are accounts to follow too.

Witness voting is tied in to how much SP you have, so ultimately, our votes as minnows don't mean a whole lot. Here is how the voting looks for the top 50 witnesses. This chart is from steemreports.com:

Those Big Dark Blue Lines are the voting power of @freedom who pretty much can single handedly make or take Top 20 status to or from a witness. the @freedom vote is proxied to @pumpkin, so Pumkin is doing the witness voting for freedom. Pumpkin is an active witness vote changer, so if a Top 20 really went dormant, he or she would lose that @freedom vote in a hurry.

The light blue at the end encompasses ALLLLL the rest of us. So when we combine a lot of minnows, we can be as powerful as Freedom, so I am not trying to say our votes don't count. But when it comes to removing a top 20 witness, there are a few people who have to see it and take action on it and that witness will be demoted in a hurry.

Hope that helps!