This has been discussed a fair bit among witnesses and other key stakeholders for years. I’ve personally been in favour of what we’ve called “decaying witness votes”, aka votes that run out after a certain time (I suggest 6 months).

A common rebuttal to this argument is often that many would simply automate re-voting those that they’ve voted on in order to not have to constantly renew their votes. (This would be very easy in the form of a third party service that would allow people to cast their votes once and then sign a new vote for the same witness as soon as the vote runs out).

As for people dying or going inactive, we’ve proposed that there should be an option for the community to “challenge” the votes cast of an inactive user. This would result in that particular account having a given time period (maybe 1 week or even 1 month) to confirm their activity. Otherwise, their votes/delegations will be set to none until they later log in to reassign their votes and delegations.

I think something like that would make sense as a way to not be forever bound by the old votes of highly inactive users. That said, I think it is more sensible to start by questioning active stakeholders who seem completely “inactive” (or careless) with how they vote and delegate. For instance, we’ve got the biggest fork yet to happen on Steem coming up (SMTs), yet we are the only witness that have carried out any meaningful tests of it on the testnet during the 4 months it has been up. Is that something that matters at all to stakeholders or voters with delegations/proxies? Do they pay active attention to what is being done, or set clear expectations from those they vote on or delegate to? I mean, we have people in the top 20 that haven’t been active at all for the past year, aside from showing up during the fork. Is that ok? I honestly don’t know (although I believe it shouldn’t be), since people are not publicly stating their expectations and reasons to vote/delegate.

Or what do you think? Do you take the time to look into witnesses activities on a regular basis and update your votes accordingly?