pull down to refresh

but also to avoid it as something that can actually harm the site's functionality.
Nah, that's not part of it. That is a champagne problem. We can't prevent this from happening. With more users, more requests will come. We just need to scale our database up (like we did a few days ago). Limiting individual users because of this wouldn't help.
So it was only to discourage spam / encourage posting good content.