May I just ask this question:

How come STEEMIT just allows a very important service (the maintenance and personal involvement of the maintainer) to be paid for by the WITNESS himself?

If STEEMIT will grow to be so so huuuuugeeeeeee, one person (I mean if you are not BILL GATES or DONALD TRUMP etc etc), you can not simply afford this effort, let alone pay it. If we all think long term here, the earnings of STEEMIT as a whole should pay for these mission-critical servers and let the experts do their job.

Take it as like a "deduction" of a witness' earnings will be just fine, but letting a WITNESS pay for so huge a monthly fee is really not long-term; believe me all of you I am a Systems Designer for these Systems. Added to this, a WITNESS operates on votes, and votes are "blindly" given here; there should be auto-witness votes when a certain service/server attains a very good milestone, this will keep the witness earnings to at least be steady and do his job efficiently. I can imagine RPC nodes here to be about 10x per witness (futuristic), if you are just voted to a certain limit NOBODY can afford that fee man, no way for sure.

If auto-UPVOTES are allowed here, why not auto-WITNESS-UPVOTE if a certain criteria is reached? This will clearly reward the CORRECT person, and a good vote will not be wasted as not all here even know what a witness vote is for sure, maybe 70% here does not know.

As per @jerrybanfield report, a certain whale auto-upvotes himself, can we not have a mechanism to at least half of those self-voting whales give his malpractice some sanctions by transferring his rewards (in auto) to very good witnesses as server fees monthly? I really think this is possible.

It does not add up guys, let us all be reasonable. Regards.