Why is reputation capped at 200 per day?

Question

From the Help Center:

You can earn a maximum of 200 reputation per day from any combination of the activities below. Bounty awards, accepted answers, and association bonuses are not subject to the daily reputation limit.

Why is there a limit on the amount of reputation that can be gained per day?

Answer 1

That limit mainly exists for two reasons :

1. It stops the site from being gamed by automated bots since the reputation limit gives a lot more time to the moderators to find them before they attain trusted reputation levels.
2. It slows down reputation gain from very active or lucky users so they do not gain abilities before they have time to understand how the site works properly.

More information can be found on the meta.stackexhange.com answer to that question.

Answer 2

Basically, it's a throttle on your trust level.

Major moderation functions are tied directly to reputation (things like editing, voting to close and deleting). The reputation cap serves to prevent you from gaining privileges that are beneficial to the site, but can be used for nefarious purposes too quickly.

Even if you somehow managed to hit the rep-cap every single day (no easy thing to do here), it would still take you somewhere around 10 days to get free editing privileges (2k), 15 to get close votes (3k) and 100 to get unfettered delete votes (20k).

This serves to force you to learn what a community is about before you get the tools to moderate it. This is a good and important thing.