Why would an elder god who depends on human worship limit the amount that it gets?

Question

This is a follow up question to this older question: How can I use my dominance of the software industry to get my customers to worship an eldritch abomination that they don't believe in?

Hastur, the king in yellow, wants to cross over into the mortal realm. To do this, he must depend on human worship to provide him with the power he needs. He has studied human history in order to find the best and fastest way to gain followers. He ultimately decides to use social media, a medium that reaches the most people around the world.

He creates a worldbuilding website in which people can discuss aspects about their world and ask questions that they are having trouble with. After they sign up and agree to a long acknowledgement contract that hastur knows nobody will read, a person will be allowed to post questions about the world they are building. Other members can up vote or down vote these questions through a system of karmic points, and give their best answers they believe will solve the problem. These answers can also be voted on by others. Questions and answers must meet certain regulations and stay within established guidelines. They must be specific, be of a particular quality, and cannot be duplicates of other previous questions.

To the outside world, this site is just a fun way to build a community and help would - be world builders create their best project. However, the truth is far more sinister. In the contract that an individual signs is a stipulation clause which states that they sell their souls to hastur upon agreement, enslaving them to him for all eternity. The karma points are a form of worship from humans that feeds the yellow king. The more up votes a question gets, the more powerful he becomes, the closer he gets to his goal.

Hastur has created a team of "moderators" to govern his site. This is a group of elected individuals who have been chosen by the king in yellow to regulate the questions and comments to prune good ones from bad. Questions that do not meet the guidelines of the site are closed and deleted after a number of days, and will no longer be able to be voted on regardless of popularity.

The question is: if the goal of Hastur is to gain power through points, why would he be picky about quality and delay his plans? Since he feeds off points regardless of quality, why would he limit the kind of worship he gets?

Answer 1

Simple, this hypothetical site (which of course bears no resemblance to any real site anyone would know) would suffer long term consequences if they don't enforce some kind of quality control. So while in the short run their users would amass more karma, the site would be less attractive to others, so in the long run there would be less users with less overall karma.

Answer 2

Do you really think a bunch of upvotes is Hastur's master plan? We're talking about an Elder God for Pete's sake! The whole point of invoking these gods in a story is that they are incomprehensible!

So my rationale for the rep caps and the closed questions is "w̹̞̤̞͕͍̦͞ḥ̤ỳ̟͉̮̼̲ͅ n̵̟̘̝o͏̛̮͍͙̯͔̣͘͜ṭ̟͓͍͕͚͍͠ͅ?"

Now let's talk really perplexing incomprehensible elder god stuff, like making a Mathematics Stack Exchange and a Math Overflow... or like pretty much all the stuff they talk about on Math Overflow.

You think we're trying to summon an eldar god? Those guys are doing the real summoning. I at least started with real human text before falling into the madness of Ç͘͏͈̹̠̙͎̳̯͚͔̼͙̻͔͖̲̩̹̕ͅt͏̖̲̤̫̤̫̼̪̥̠͙͚͍̭́ͅḩ̡̲͈̫̯͚͉̱͍̳͝ù̧͙̭̙̻̲̙͚͔̲̬͚͢͝͡ḻ̴̵̨̹͉͙̟̯̞̠͔̦̝̩͜h̶̼̜̦͖͍͎͍̕ṷ̴̶̢͙̗̬͇̯̞̗̰̣̬̥̲̣̦ text. They aren't even chanting in English anymore!

Answer 3

Hastur is a reflection of what people think he is.

If Hastur just needed upvotes, he'd build a website dedicated to cat videos. Even elder gods love cat videos. However, Hastur's need for worship isn't a simple "5000 upvotes for an extra +5 to infernal wailing" equation of upvotes to power. Instead, Hastur build his power off of human perception of what they think he can do.

None of that is explicitly laid out in the worldbuilding FAQs, of course. Instead, hidden deep in the EULA, which Hastur knows full well that nobody will ever read, is a caveat that states that any question about worldbuilding actually relates to Hastur's abilities, and an upvote is a measure of belief in that ability. If someone asks "what sort of poisonous insects would make the best projectiles?" that question provides Hastur with the power to launch poisonous insects as projectiles.

This brings us to the need for moderation. Badly thought out questions, at best, will lead to poorly defined and difficult to use abilities. If people are focused on fixing the spelling errors, and wondering how a question even makes sense, they aren't spending their time mentally defining new powers and abilities. Moderating his worldbuilding website keeps people focused on good questions, which will lead to solid, usable powers for the elder god.

Answer 4

The karmic points are nice, but what Hastor really craves are those tasty souls that the terms&services provides. The king in yellow is aware that more, and more tasty, souls will be attracted by the siren song of quality.

Answer 5

A United Community Builds Power United

Hastur is a clever elder god: he has seen what has happened to his sibling El. Once a powerful deity, El ruled over people across all the Mediterranean, but as his worship spread, his worshippers began to divide and turn against each other... and as they divided, so was El divided. Century after century, El was fractured over and over, his power fading like an empire split amongst warring sons. Now, El has been so thoroughly shattered that each of his aspects is as weak as a newborn kitten.

Hastur does not want to make this mistake. He places devoted cultists, these ‘’moderators’, adherent to tightly-binding rules, to administer his new ‘faith battery’, stripping away divisive influences and keeping his power base intact. After all, it’s not just about having power, it’s about directing it the way he wants, as well.