The headline on this press release/blog post is pretty straightforward.

Why We’re Raising the Signature Threshold for We the People

So is the explanation.

When we launched We the People, none of us knew how popular it would be, but it's exceeded our wildest expectations. Through the past year, interest in We the People exploded and we're closing in on 10 million signatures.

When we first raised the threshold — from 5,000 to 25,000 — we called it "a good problem to have." Turns out that "good problem" is only getting better, so we're making another adjustment to ensure we’re able to continue to give the most popular ideas the time they deserve.

Starting today, as we move into a second term, petitions must receive 100,000 signatures in 30 days in order to receive an official response from the Obama Administration. This new threshold applies only to petitions created from this point forward and is not retroactively applied to ones that already exist.

But the real answer is really much more basic. it consists of two points.

1) We don't really like having to answer the petitions of the American people who have things they want the government doing. It is just too much work.

2) Conservatives have discovered that they can use the website to promote their causes and embarrass the Administration by posting petitions that we are just going to reject anyway, so we are going to make it harder for them to do.

In other words, this is just one more repudiation of "government of the people, by the people, for the people" by an administration that doesn't much care what the American people want.