While I agree with you I also think it is hard enough to get people to vote for witnesses in the first place, once you start expiring votes they may never place them again.
I think dead votes is a huge issue and should be addressed sooner than later. But the solutions are not pretty.
I think non-participating witnesses with large for-life votes is equally frustrating.
The beauty of a liquid democracy is how quickly it can adapt. This requires active participation of the voters, or the use of an active proxy though. To keep it liquid, measures to avoid clogging are required.
I somewhat disagree with that it's hard to get people to vote for witnesses. What's really hard is having them make educated choices based on whatever principles besides "he did me well".
Politics are hard, and few people want to spend lots of time with it. And if someone doesn't keep up to date I even prefer them to leave that part of decision making to others, either by not voting or using a proxy.
You realize stats show less than 30% of the platform, closers to 25% have ever even cast a vote, right? Malcolm's right.
I know more than one spam looking account voted to high-heaven by witnesses which doesn't cast witness votes - I wonder why that is?
One can only imagine ;)
Completely agree with this, I can't count how many times I get a message or lose a vote because "I voted you as witness, but you never visited my blog and upvoted me".