Thank you for the detailed feedback! This feature comes from a community motion proposal adopted a while back, then a more detailed motion proposal was submitted and adopted after a community discussion on the implementation design.
We agree with the importance of onboarding new users, and it will be a big focus of DFINITY in 2025. The motion proposal describes it in more detail, but the TLDR of the reasoning behind this feature are the following:
- Governance participants need to do work in order to receive voting rewards, since maturity is not dividend, but rewards given out by the protocol for participating in governance (doing work). While it is not expected that participants vote manually on all proposals, hence the following mechanism, it is required that they at least vote once every 6 months or confirm their following.
- The NNS changes over time, which also means that neurons you started following years ago might not be the neurons you would follow today, so it is encouraged to review periodically which neurons you would like to follow today.
Note: following multiple neurons on the same topic may be unproductive in some cases. If you follow two neurons on one topic, where one votes to adopt, and the other abstains, your neuron will not be voting as neuron following requires a majority vote to adopt in order to be triggered.
Neuron following is quite complex as it is implemented now, and we do plan to submit proposals to simplify the user flow, and do a better job at explaining how the system works.