Alright, the Piers Morgan one I understand, but the Death Star one was awesome both because it was inherently funny, and because it gave the administration a chance to show a more human face (which those in the WH should appreciate). I find it odd that they'd look at a gift like that and decide it was a problem.
More like they've realized how easy and useless it is to create a petition and have people who "support" it spend 5 seconds clicking thru any petition that comes into whitehouse.gov, so they are raising the bar to cut down on the time they waste responding to nonsense.
It's certainly better than anything I'd thought of, but I don't really think of WtP as a user-based site in the same way that Digg is/was. People don't, I suspect, sign up for an account and then regularly visit and choose which petitions to sign. Rather, someone starts a facebook campaign, people go to the site, sign up, vote, then forget about it. I'm guessing regular emails from WtP inviting someone who once voted to ban abortion to come back and vote on a random issue probably wouldn't work out very well.
The site could, instead, be turned into a more community-oriented place, with discussions on the proposed petitions and a sense of being part of the in-crowd when one you've talked about gets answered.
In fact, this is starting to sound an awful lot like Wikipedia, with the same kinds of drives and motivations. Create a set of guidelines for community interaction and petition content, then let "contributors" monitor proposed petitions, cull the obvious crap, improve the writing and cases cited, then publish them to the "new" page. You could have a couple of White House interns be mods and settle any disputes between members.
I'm just brainstorming, here. In reality, it seems like an idea that's nice in principle but unworthy and unworkable in practice.
I know, right? When else do you get to say "The Administration does not support blowing up planets"? I think that was my favorite piece of the whole Death Star thing.
The Piers Morgan petition was only a softball to those capable of rational thought. To the many people who signed it, it was a legitimate petition. The purpose of raising the signature limit was to prevent petitions like that from reaching the point at which the WH has obligated itself to respond.
They're fooling themselves if they imagine 100k will stop annoying petitions that 25k wouldn't stop. That's a blindness to the dynamics of how these things work.