I really can't comment on my reasoning too much, but generally speaking, it's a sucky and desperate tactic, IMO.
The problem with gauging anything by player post counts is that you are going to have people who post way more than others, and it skews the entire perception of what "a normal range of posting" should be. The rules we've been using obligate people to post once per day phase. That's once every four days or so. In other words, we're looking at the acceptable baseline of posts for these games right now being, what...2 posts? That's a lot less than what people are being called out for.
Of course, it's good if people participate more than that, but we're seeing the overall post counts in these games creep up each gen (creep is an understatement). I'd say we're easily going to reach 3x the posts in these games as the first game, and yet I don't feel like that first game was lacking in posts or discussion.
Post frequency doesn't mean much. There might be more substance to the posts of someone with 1/4 the posts of the top posters. Aside from people being busy, there might be different motivations for why someone would want to deliberately stay quiet - it's not always good or bad. People can reason it either way, so it's a not a clear indicator.
It's just clumsy, meta-game reasoning. I believe one of the reasons we've been having chaotic occurrences in our games is because people are putting more value on talking any amount of shit over maintaining a measured silence.
