Petition to limit daily posts per user in this community

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.

83 comments

Everyone on Lemmy seems to be trying to find ways to reduce content, as if we're sitting here drowning in it.
- Right?! LMAO
- That’s kind of been my position too. Like I guess “people were posting low quality content” but if it’s no evidence of malice/rule breaking, what’s stopping people from just curating their feed and blocking users they see too much?
  Still fifty-fifty on this for the record but I am glad there is more wholesome and constructive discussion on this still coming in :)

I have yet to see any frequent posters pushing misinformation.
I have yet to see any frequent posters discouraging participation.
I have yet to see any frequent posters pushing quantity over quality.
To me, it seems like this post is addressing what's currently a non-issue. That is, this feels like someone's pet peeve about frequent posters dressed up as something beneficial using a list of non-applicable pros.
Meanwhile, news communities are posted to so infrequently on Lemmy that literal bots exist to fill the gaps. I would much prefer a human than a bot indiscriminately hammering the community with news (absent any evidence whatsoever that this would improve human engagement, when realistically, any humans who'd want to participate could do so at any time but haven't).
- !politics@lemmy.world had UniversalMonk in the run up to the American election. They have about 15 alts, posted an average of 16 articles a day just on the main account, and would pointedly refuse to engage with any discussion of the actual content of the article in the comments. They were banned for "Indiscriminate posting of duplicate stories from different sources to flood the channel."
  That's not this community, of course, but I think it is proof enough that it's not an unreasonable concern for OP to have
  
  EDIT: @PhilipTheBucket@ponder.cat is right that Monk substantially ramped up their post count in the month of October, being typically 6+ per day. I was mistaken about point 1 for that month, although I stand by that other months like September, they were about 3 per day.
  I'll note that I consistently called out Monk to the point that multiple comments of mine lambasting them got deleted (the mods were just being fair and enforcing the rules consistently; hats off).
  However, there are some points you've failed to take into account:
  (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.
  As your own comment notes, making alts is a trivial matter, especially assuming you're more subtle about the angle you're pushing than Monk was. That I was aware of Monk for months but knew and heard nothing about these purported alts is, to me, evidence of that.
  Every single post by Monk was heavily downvoted because everyone knew what they were doing.
  The main problem with Monk was their comments, wherein they would engage in essentially copy-pasting Gish gallop responses. The moderators knew banning Monk would've made the community healthier because of this exact behavior but refused to take action.
  Even if the problem had been the quantity of the posts to /c/politics (it wasn't), the moderators would've been able to use their discretion to ban Monk instead of a blanket ban on frequent posts.
  TL;DR: Monk's problem on /c/politics had nothing to do with and could not have been stopped by such a rule proposed in the OP.
  
  UM was a case for moderators to use their discretion, not a blanket ban for everyone who posts a lot.
  There are a couple accounts that do a lot of heavy lifting for these communities in a fair and balanced way.
  
  How would this rule prevent alts? Seems like it would encourage their use if anything
  
  It's not an unreasonable concern, no. But I'd rather the community be active and growing than address something that's not currently an issue.
  
  They have about 15 alts,
  So the banning seems totally ineffective. And Trump would have won anyway. So again, banning was totally ineffective and did nothing but spurn him on to post from more alts.
  If you all would have just let him do his thing, you could block him and then never see his stuff.
  But you all decided ban, he spread out amongst instances and usernames and now posts more than ever. lol
  
  And now he just posts to other communities. Banning didn't do anything to stop him, while Trump still won. Banning him just spread him out even more. It's also very easy to just create new usernames. He probably has lots of alt usernames. So he can still post anywhere he wants to.
  Banning did absolutely nothing to stop him. I still see his all over Lemmy. Welcome to the fediverse.
- Agreed!

Sounds like a good way to lose our most prevalent posters and kill the community.
- Yep
- I certainly think the number of the limit is a key consideration and really makes it or breaks it.

We do allow [META] posts, when in good faith and on topic.
Allowing this to stay up.
- 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. :)
  
  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.
  
  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
- There ought to be rules governing these posts to keep users who don't check the community on weekends or off hours from being blindsided by rule changes. Something like a designated day of the week for meta posts and a minimum time duration they need to be considered for.
  
  Your comment is confusing because this is a petition post, not a rule change. I have no leadership role here. If anything changes there will most likely be internal mod communication and then an announcement post if the rule change is significant enough to merit it.

if the mods notice a problem, then maybe consider action. but until then, no action needed

there are several news communities and most likely people look at multiple. multiposters will still be able to post to the fediverse news communities overall regardless of some rule on this community.

I don't think the proposal is necessary, at least not until it can account for the possibility of someone creating a legion of alt accounts to circumvent the rule.
In fact, if I am trying to push propaganda/news from biased sources, it would probably improve credibility if I stage it to look like it is coming organically from a dozen different accounts instead of just one.
- yep
- That’s an excellent point. Like, if we are going to have high-volume power users (which is an inevitability) it’s honestly arguably good and transparent for them to use single accounts that individual users can block—like at least they are known power users and it’s not being obfuscated.
  I’m personally still fifty-fifty on the rule but this did sway me a bit.

If you or others don't like the quality of content, then post more quality content. You can always block people you don't wanna get news from.
You are acting like Lemmy has some sway over the world or elections. Dude, hardly anyone has even heard of Lemmy.
Lemmy's need to go outside and visit the real world for a bit. lol
- Yeah this is also where I am more or less coming from. I think it’s good for it to be said in a meta post where the discussion is built for it.
  
  Fair enough.

Posting this because no one else seems to want to,
Maybe because it's a bad idea that wouldn't solve something that's not even a problem but would make the community more difficult to use.
Frequent posters don't hold any more special influence than irregular posters, posts are sorted by their upvotes and downvotes not by who posts them.
A community with stupid rules that removes your post for no reason because you went beyond some arbitrary limit will discourage new members from participating
It is dumb to think about a news community in terms of quality and quantity. Not every news article should be some 10000 word Pulitzer prize winning deep dive, some of them are just going to be two paragraph breaking news updates. Also, there are some days where not a lot of news happens and some days where a ton happens, and this idea would just make the community struggle to be relevant and up to date on those big news days. If somebody posts a dumb news story, downvote it and leave a comment about why it's dumb and post a better one.
I don't want you or anyone else determining the value of another post for me beyond your up/downvote and comment. If the post actually breaks a community rule that we've all been informed about and agree to by participating then a mod can remove it, but if you just don't like what's being discussed then just downvote and deal with it, and if you just don't like the person who posted it then please fuck off with your incivility to another website.
People who really do want to push misinformation will just make alts that will work around this system, so you'll be making the community harder for people to use transparently while doing nothing to discourage bad actors
and it’s a discussion worth having outside of drama or personal conflicts.
If you wanted to avoid personal conflicts maybe don't propose a rule judging posts based on who posted them and what else they've posted instead of the content of the post itself
- Fucking great post, sir!
- Thanks for your input! It is valuable.
  Re: your last paragraph. I’m literally just a third party user who was not involved in any of the conflict in any way, suggesting one potential resolution that at this point I still think could go either way.
  It’s fair to assume that I was talking about myself but rest assured I have no personal investment here and my only commitment is to what is best for the community. :)

I prefer quality over quantity but is the limited number of posters because they are quick to post news as it happens or because Lemmy is still relatively small?