The witness vote decay rule was introduced in HF25 and results in the witness votes expiring after 1 year of no witness votes being made by the account. I'm in the process of adding a script to display what this is going to do to the witness ranks when it goes live - to the new Hive stats site I am building.
I think the format of this new rule seems reasonable, though I imagine that some people will just run a bot to make a new witness vote every so often automatically.
Ah, ok. I remember reading about that being proposed for a HF, but don't recall it being implemented. Good to know that it was rolled out.
I don't like your comment about bots.. but that makes complete sense .. since folks around here use bots for everything..
There's no way around people automating their own activity on Hive, so such a bot is to be expected. At least the decay will remove hangover stake from Steem users who aren't active on Hive.
Agreed. Clearing of the stagnant votes will be interesting to watch!
Delegating their witness votes is essentially the same thing, so technically no new bot is necessary.