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.
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.
This is way off. During the October run-up when Monk was trying hard to influence the election, he was posting 10-15 times a day, which is about as much as anyone ever posts.
That’s how many times only to the politics community, no other place, on each of those days.
This part, I 100% agree with. Discretion is always a part of moderation, and the fact that they didn’t exercise discretion and common sense with Monk (and in fact actively protected him by banning people who he egged into conflicts with him) doesn’t mean that we should set some kind of new discretion-free policy that will impact the heavy posters who do bring something good.
But most of those were him actually replying to comments he received first. So I don’t think that counts.
Also, please give us a count of your daily posts and comments, because I see you way more than I ever saw him.
Actually, no, this isn’t correct. Go to Page 4 of Monk’s post history, and you’ll see that indeed all of those numbers are posts to /c/politics. @PhilipTheBucket@ponder.cat was correct here; I was checking the wrong month.
Fair enough. But how many of those were posts vs comments?
And if the comments were him replying to people conversing with him, does that count? Because I see a lot of people mad that people post WITHOUT engaging in the comments under the post.
So which is it? Should people reply to people commenting on their posts or no? Because I’m looking at Universal Monks post history on world, and the vast majority were him just replying to people that commented on his replies and his posts. In other words, he was answering people asking him stuff and saying stuff about him.
If no one would have replied to his posts, then his comment history wouldn’t be so large. And since they weren’t ignoring/blocking him, they they were engaging in conversation with him. So does that count as spam or trolling?
I’d argue that he INCREASED community engagement.
I just posted the numbers of philipthebucket. Should he be banned? Is he a spammer troll based on the number of comments and posts? over 2,000 comments in 7 months is a shit ton of commenting. I’m not saying he should be, but he would be severely limited under a limited post rule as well.
No, no, you’re misunderstanding: every single number you see in Philip’s comment was 1) a post and 2) in /c/politics. You can go look for yourself as I suggested. For instance, when Philip’s comment says “2024-10-19: 6” that means (and you can go verify using the means I described on desktop) that Monk posted 6 times to /c/politics that day. That excludes comments.
Ahh, ok. But again, I’d say there are other posters who post almost as much and don’t catch the flack that he does.
Not that I am arguing with you, since I think you and I both agree there should be no limit.
I feel that since the vast majority of comments that Monk made were replying and answering comments he was receiving, it’s just community engagement and not detrimental to the community.
I also don’t even see 9 posts a day as a big thing. That’s like one post an hour for an average day. I read WAY more posts than that online during a day.
It’s a feed the troll thing. I see everyone talking about how he was such a troll, but look how few people actually blocked him, and would engage him.
And he’s still around, and I only commented two his posts a couple of times, so I really don’t care. But I just see his name come up all the time, and I never see anything that he did that was nearly as horrible as people imply.
I see MUCH worse in c/politics now than I did back then. I see outright nazi comments, calls to violence, etc.
UM never did any of that. As far as I can tell, everyone was pissed because he refused to back off saying he was going to vote third party–which now isn’t nearly as terrible to say as it was then. But I realize that’s veering off-topic for this discussion.
Fair enough!
Great points! Have my upvote.