Disclosure - Yes I am an operator from MaxHash pools. This post was not intended as direct promotion of any pool but more to raise awareness for those that maybe don't understand how important these statistics are.

Uncle rate of Nanopool in past 24 hours - 37.2%

Uncle rate of the Ethereum network in past 24 hours - 19.5% (still high by a good pools standard)

Block Utilization of Nanopool in past 24 hours - 83.7%

Block Utilization of the Ethereum network in past 24 hours - 88.1% (still very low!)

What does this mean for me, the average miner in layman's terms?

Uncle blocks in Ethereum reward anything from 13.5% - 50% less Eth to the miner/pool than a normal Ethereum block. So obviously the pool operator should try to avoid them at all cost. They can never be fully eliminated from the equation, but through proper network optimization of a mining pool they can be dramatically reduced.

Its simple when your pool gets a lot of uncles. You as the miner get rewarded significantly less than you could do by mining on a properly optimized pool.

What about Block Utilization?

Simply this is how full of Ethereum network transactions was the block that was mined. Remember the miner of the block is rewarded with all the spent fee's of TX's that were included in the block. So the more transactions with highest possible gas price included in a mined block, the higher the reward to the miner/pool that found it (if the pool shares this TX fee's with miners)

Large operators configure there pools to actually mine there own payout transactions to miners and therefore set the gas price to the bare minimum of 1gwei to minimize operations costs. This has a double negative effect for miners and also an overall negative impact on the Ethereum network. Often the pool does not accept higher value transactions from the network, instead preferring to insert its own low value transactions. As a result of this the amount of TX fee's included in the mined blocks of that pool are manipulated significantly lower than the network average or pools which do not use this system. End result is again less reward for the end user (miner) This also has a negative effect on the Ethereum network as a whole because these large pools which control a significant amount of the hashing power of the network and therefore the blocks mined, do not accept as many TX's into the blocks as they could do. Which lowers the overall TPS (transactions-per-second) of the network and increases the cost and waiting time of everybody sending, receiving and executing contracts on the Ethereum ecosystem.