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[Meta] Petition to limit daily posts per user in this community (lemmy.cafe)
submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by spujb@lemmy.cafe to c/news@lemmy.world
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Posting this because no one else seems to want to, and it’s a discussion worth having outside of drama or personal conflicts. I’m undecided and can see both sides, but it’s important to address.

Potential benefits of a limit:

  • Frequent posters hold significant influence and could, in theory, push misinformation or propaganda (though I haven't seen evidence of this it’s a fair concern).
  • A community dominated by one or two voices might discourage new members from participating.
  • Encouraging quality over quantity could increase the value of individual posts.

Potential downsides of a limit:

  • Could reduce overall community engagement.
  • If set too low, it might discourage meaningful participation from well-intentioned members.
  • It could inadvertently encourage the (mis)use of alt accounts.

These are some pros/cons but certainly not all! I encourage more discussion below.

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[-] spujb@lemmy.cafe 1 points 1 year ago

Thanks! Of course I never had any doubts about this being left up but I do find it funny the number of people who were rudely adamant that this post was impossible, impossible I tell you!

cc @PhilipTheBucket@ponder.cat @catloaf@lemm.ee I encourage you to add your input under this impossible post. :)

[-] PhilipTheBucket@ponder.cat 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Ha. My input for what it's worth:

I'm not sure about setting a hard-and-fast rule, in part because at present some of the heaviest posters are also the highest-quality posters. MicroWave often reaches 10-15 posts per day, and their contributions are clearly an improvement to the community. I wouldn't want to set any kind of rule that would imply that they shouldn't be doing that.

The issue with The Poster Who Shall Not Be Named was not only that, on some days, they were hitting 20-30 posts per day to this community alone, but also that the posts were of an amazingly low quality. In my mind, proper moderation should take account of that kind of thing and use common sense and responsiveness to community complaints, meaning we don't need a special specific rule "please don't make 30 crap posts in a single day." The issue was mostly just that they weren't contributing good things to the community, not that there is some upper limit to how many posts in a day people should be doing.

Edit: The Poster Who Shall Not Be Named is not UniversalMonk, it's the poster me and OP were talking about that set off this conversation. Although, UniversalMonk is another useful data point for this whole conversation, and pretty much the same type of logic applies to them and any alts.

[-] spujb@lemmy.cafe 1 points 1 year ago

Valuable analysis ty

[-] DonaldJMusk@lemmy.today -1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Actually as @TheTechnician2@lemmy.world pointed out in his post (if you are talking about Univeral Monk, who others are mentioning in this thread):

(Most important) Monk posted to /c/politics at most about three times per day. This is realistically the bare minimum amount you’d want as a cap on posts per day. You can go back and check this for yourself; the overwhelming majority of their posts were on communities they created and moderated. Checking the month of September, the exception I saw to this was September 8th, where they posted four. This rule would have done absolutely nothing to deter their propaganda campaign.

And also, banning Monk did nothing to stop him. He's still all over Lemmy posting whatever he wants to. As is his right. Not to mention how easy it is to create alts.

[-] PhilipTheBucket@ponder.cat 1 points 1 year ago

I actually meant a different user, not UniversalMonk. This whole meta post stemmed out of some minor unrelated localized drama, I didn't name the user because it's 100% irrelevant to this whole discussion except in the sense of having sparked it off in the first place.

But also, UniveralMonk posted a lot more than 3 times. For anyone who's an admin, the query if you're interested is:

Huge SQL Query

WITH daily_post_counts AS (
  SELECT 
    DATE(p.published) as post_date,
    p.creator_id,
    per.actor_id as poster_actor_id,
    COUNT(*) as post_count,
    -- Rank posters within each day by their post count
    ROW_NUMBER() OVER (
      PARTITION BY DATE(p.published) 
      ORDER BY COUNT(*) DESC
    ) as poster_rank
  FROM post p
  JOIN person per ON p.creator_id = per.id
  WHERE 
    -- Filter for the specific community
    p.community_id = (
      SELECT id 
      FROM community 
      WHERE actor_id = 'https://lemmy.world/c/politics'
    )
    -- Exclude deleted and removed posts
    AND NOT p.deleted 
    AND NOT p.removed
  GROUP BY 
    DATE(p.published),
    p.creator_id,
    per.actor_id
)
SELECT 
  post_date,
  poster_actor_id,
  post_count
FROM daily_post_counts
WHERE poster_rank <= 3
ORDER BY 
  post_date DESC,
  post_count DESC;

It's actually a lot more interesting to look over than I thought it would be. It's all pretty normal at the beginning, but then at the end of April, there starts to be a sprinkling of a multitude of pretty-bad-faith-IMO posters, all starting to be represented more or less at the same time. They all just kind of start up in a little sprinkling, and then at the beginning of July, that stops and it starts to be almost all either normal posters or return2ozma, and then in early August UniversalMonk shows up, and they're both heavily featured from then on. They're both competitive with the heaviest of the other posters, with UniversalMonk peaking I think at 17 posts in one day on October 8th. Then, in late October, UM gets banned, and it goes back completely to normal except for occasional bursts of single posters (Joker@sh.itjust.works being an example) popping up and doing super-heavy posting and then disppearing as they get banned.

I also see at least one of the heavy productive-post posters, that people don't tend to hate the posts of, dropping out of the rotation, when they used to be heavily featured. That to me is a really sad thing. I have no idea why, sometimes stuff happens, but to me it seems at least a little bit likely that they got driven away by the periodic floods of propaganda and nonsense infesting what was just a normal news community, which would be really sad if that's how it happened.

[-] DonaldJMusk@lemmy.today -3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

UniversalMonk peaking I think at 17 posts in one day on October 8th

In one community though? Because that's like 2 posts a day over an 8 hour day. Lots of posters post more than that even now, and they're not called trolls. Look at how much Blaze posts and comments. lol

And you, yourself sir, are on A LOT. Like how many posts and comments do you make a day?

[-] DonaldJMusk@lemmy.today -1 points 1 year ago

cc @PhilipTheBucket@ponder.cat @catloaf@lemm.ee I encourage you to add your input under this impossible post. :)

hahahahaha

Philipthebucket likes to talk about how much he hates .world, but he's still here looking around every day. lmao

[-] PhilipTheBucket@ponder.cat -1 points 1 year ago

Yes, I always read the comments in detail under every single post, just looking to see if someone has @ed me, since Lemmy for some reason doesn't send a notification for that. Someday, maybe they'll get around to implementing that.

I actually do read !news@lemmy.world, it is the last remaining big-name LW community that I'm still subscribed to. I like the posts in general and I often upvote them. I usually stay out of the comments unless something specifically draws my attention to them, and when I visit I am often struck by the high level of stupidness and regret having come into them in the first place.

I think the moderation here used to be quite good, an anomaly among LW communities, but now it seems like it's succumbing to the tide.

this post was submitted on 23 Feb 2025
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