Ok, so in the announcement post they talk about mostly technical reasons for this. But from the linked post it does in fact sound like the aim is to throttle most active members because they have too much influence?

This is what rubbed me the wrong way and I just couldn't figure out why. We all have one upvote to give, some people just give it way more of them - so in comes the great equalizer in the form of the daily quota.

I hope you pardon my exagerated metaphor, but this is like limiting free speech for journalists, because they excercise the right of free speech way more than others.

It's "just" votes so I'm hesitant to call this censorship but... this does feel like a first step. Will there be daily post quotas too because some people post more than others?

It will make it easier for a bot farm to outvote the humans.

Farming engagement has no incentive. It can't be monetized here, there's no karma. There would be no point.

Power users on the fediverse aren't doing it for personal gain, they're doing it to enrich the fediverse and make it a more attractive alternative to corporate social media.

We see so many complaints that it's dead here, or there aren't enough communities, or it's hard to find the right community for something, or if the community exists it might be dead. That's a lot of people's rationale for not switching from reddit.

Power users here are trying to fix that. It's an enormous task and more than a single user or a handful of users can do, but they're doing their part and in many cases carrying more than their share of the burden. This change is kind of a slap in the face to them.

That's the thing - Rimu openly admits that he doesn't think that the power voters are bots. The issue isn't distinguishing us. It's just that Rimu doesn't like so many votes being cast by so few users. Shit man, if I encounter two active discussions in a day (admittedly not a daily occurrence on the sometimes-sleepy Fediverse), I'll be close to hitting the 240 limit simply by having an opinion on the majority of comments.

Shit, my vote quota is half-used-up today just from this comment section. I haven't even posted or browsed anything else.

As someone with a laundry list of physical and mental ailments, my 'touching grass' time is extremely limit, and general I reserve the monumental effort there for important issues - like keeping up with the social events of my actual friends, or participating in local politics in my increasingly-fucked-and-fascist country. "Touch grass, it's more fun than shitposting about history!" doesn't really apply for me.

All social media pretty much operates on a 90/9/1 division. Only 1% of users actively post. Only a fraction of that 1% are power users like PugJesus. Killing power users won't accomplish a different division of labour where more people post, it will only accomplish killing the ecosystem as a whole.

You thought the Fediverse was dead now? Wait until the power users disappear.