The Rogers PieFed InstanceHow many posts per hour is acceptable?
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PieFed dev
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RimuI recently did a bit of digging and found that the most-blocked accounts are those that do big floods of posts, some only seconds apart. One possible way to deal with this could be to rate-limit the posts by turning posts into unpublished scheduled posts when they start posting too fast. The scheduled posts would eventually be published, but in the future at a sensible speed. But when should the rate limit kick in?
Considering that I tend to post in concentrated bursts, I’m gonna say that rate limiting makes me uneasy.
My last ‘burst’ was 19 posts in about an hour.
PieFed would automatically spread those posts out over 19 hours, for you (if the rate limit was 1 per hour, the most restrictive option). If that led to less people blocking you and more people seeing your posts, wouldn’t that be a win-win?
Not really, no. Timing of posts is important - a post at 1 AM gets different engagement than a post at 5 AM. Not only that, but concentrating the timing of posts also concentrates the timing of activity on those posts - as I tend to post when I have a bit of free time, especially to make responses, spreading those posts apart would be counter to that aim.
Yes, good point.
Limiting posts over a four or eight hour sliding window might help: allowing short bursts of concurrent posts but not a sustained flood of posts.
ugh. I always found those reddit analysis of best time to post for karma as being annoying. I would much prefer people act organically and live with the odds.
I prefer to post when it’ll get seen. “No upvotes or downvotes” is a disappointing doldrums which very much can happen. In my experience, 1 AM-3 AM is the worst time. Before that, there are still some night owls; after that Europe starts to wake up.
As an insomniac, it’s a hard-learned lesson.
I don’t plan my posts intensely, but there are a few times when I’ll hold off for an hour or two because I know it’s a low-activity time of the day.
For that, cant you use the scheduled post feature and it will automatically post in a couple hours, for example?
I could. But setting up a dozen scheduled posts is more trouble than just doing something else and coming back in an hour or two to post them manually.
How soon do you expect upvotes? This is where to many posts is an issue. I like going to a community and look over the posts in the last day or when busy the last few days or a week on the weekend. Communities with to many post span and not enough earnest posts from people who have a major interest in the subject makes me more likely to just not be part of that community. Its the whole internet thing with to much spam and not enough realness.
If there’s not a single upvote or downvote in the first hour, in my experience, there won’t be one all week. Most people sort by ‘hot’ or ’new’, and most people sorting by ’new’ aren’t going back for pages and pages to find something.
Posting a bunch of posts when you’re online seems organic enough
I guess in the same way the spasdic friend starts a string of talking with no breaks that goes into a bunch of subjects before you can get a word edge wise. As that sentence and much of my federtaion communication can attest :) . I guess what im saying is hey man you enjoy that first conversation before going to the second. You post well though from what I can tell.
It’s asynchronous communication, parallel conversation with different people can happen at the same time
Thank you, though I post in bursts, and when I think people are online
Did you not propose that posts by community moderators would be exempt from counting in this system?
The majority of active posters aren’t mods in their communities
!superbowl@lemmy.world is a famous example
Cross-posting the same post in 4 communities should count as only one post.
PieFed does well at combining cross-posts into one thread so to a user this should just look like one post (across say 4 tech communities)
8 unique posts in an hour feels like spam.
2 unique posts across 4 communities, not at all
Relatedly, although off-topic from the original discussion, I would love to see the same grouping happen to text posts that have the same title and body text, posted by the same user to multiple communities. Currently when someone does this and doesn’t cross-post they spam the feed because they are ungrouped.
There’s an issue open to fix exactly this
https://codeberg.org/rimu/pyfedi/issues/996
I think this is a great idea. But can it be a 3-way-switch for the Admin on the account, and not be automatic? And can the system detection of, say, 15 posts per hour, trigger an alert to the Admin instead of taking action? Then the Admin can decide whether the account should be rate limited. The switch would have 3 settings: No rate limit (default), rate limit, don’t notify me about this account any longer.
The rate per hour might also be a setting the Admin can set. This way, you don’t have to worry about what setting is appropriate to implement. Every Admin can decide for their own instance.
Would this just be for controlling local accounts? Or would it also impact remote accounts? Can an Admin set a value that says the instance won’t accept posts from anyone who has posted more than 20 times in an hour?
Just to clarify, is the suggested rate limiting per community, or for the whole account?
I tend to post 3 posts max per community, but that can be over 5 communities, so 15 posts per hour.
I think to be effective it would have to be for the whole account. A lot of people browse ‘All’.
There’s nothing wrong with posting too fast and then getting rate limited, your posts would still get published. Eventually. It’s not intended to be a punishment, just a way to leave a bit of oxygen in the room for others.
As PJ pointed out in another comment, timing of a post is going to influence its visibility.
If it has to be for the whole account, then I would personally go for 20 posts per hour.
More is better, I can block more active posters I don’t personally like on my own. Don’t feel strongly about this though.
I’m more worried about the fact there’s nothing in place to deal with bots…if it’s even possible to do anything effective at all. Rate limited bots are still bots.
Rather than having a limit on number of posts in general, would it be difficult to take note of repetitions?
If this is about spam bot accounts, can posts (made by the same user) be counted or tracked in an automated way that checks for repetitions and limit the number of times such a post can be made?
So if someone posts something, no matter what, and that something is repeated too many times, that user gets a time out and staff gets alerted.
If the main concern is spam slop, Maybe monitoring the speed of the posting on a per user basis before triggering the temporary rate-limiting cache ? You say the post are seconds apart which sounds a little inhumanly fast. If someones posting too much too fast, those act as conditionals which then trigger a rate limiting system. That way normal users won’t ever be confused about why their post isn’t showing up, very active users only occasionally trigger the cache limiter with it being reset after some time, and accounts that consistently spam get consistently filtered.
How much of a problem are these accounts? Is it worth spending the time, energy, and added complexity of a cache rate limiter? Are there easier to implement solutions? Is it even a problem that needs fixing or just an annoyance pet peeve?
Cross posting is a fairly easy way to duplicate/spam post. perhaps removing the ability to make crosspost when rate limited is another option to reduce spam.
Ok, seems like most people are not in favour of this idea. Will think of something else.
rate limiting posters is not good imo. there are 3 cases i think
bot accounts (could be rss bots or spam bots) - they can be rate limited, since there is no human involved. in case of rss, it just is to bring common places to threadiverse, and often get less interaction (specifically comments) than human posts. them being delyaed is fine i guess. but still i can see 10 a hour being fine (if they fetch a source 1 or 2 times a day, and each pull pulls 10-20 posts, them being rate limited is not great but still acceptable i guess).
active posters - it harms them. for example blaze has said this in detail, to my mind more names come (for example - sunshine, pugjesus, fossilesque, ladybutterfly and many more). they should not be rate limited.
human spammers - it hurts them, but they are “bad” so i guess it is fine.
I think what can be done - for non bot accounts - there can be a special tag (like how you or wsj8 have piefed developer tags) such as ‘frequent posters’ and then it is upto communities or instances to handle them.
MORE = BETTER
its more a per day thing for me. 24 to 48 posts in a day??? no thank you.
I vote Boaty McBoatface.
13 posts within an hour is not that much. If I sit down at the weekend, read my favourite communities and write a couple posts and replies, I can easily be over 30.
Weird idea here, but rather than rate limit how about highlight?
For example, when I read posts, I often just see the account and then the post. I might see that the account is new, but don’t realize that the account could be high volume and requires a further look.
I’m wondering though if there’s any sense to apply a checkbox feature where accounts get either a note or a flair, with either a number and a colour code. If an account hits an arbitrary rate, then the post per hour should show up. So for example, my name runsmooth [rate number]. Color can just suggest for how long that rate is maintained, perhaps green for 24 hours, yellow for 48 hours, orange for 72 hours, and red for 100 hours.
At that point people can decide for themselves what to do with the highlighted account, or raise discussion about what’s happening. Perhaps it’s a bot and should be labelled. Or maybe it’s hosing the communities to “flood the zone” and run soft censorship. At least by then the account in question is high profile for all to see.
Yes we considered that. Thing is, people on Lemmy will not see the warning and continue to upvote and reply.
I suppose it’s already the beauty of the Fediverse that the Piefed folks can see something that others don’t.
Perhaps the Piefed folks can just raise the alarm by making reports.
Oh yes we have been making reports for weeks but Lemmy doesn’t have a way to fix it other than manual mod intervention which burns people out.
Anyway, a few days ago I wrote a 1 line change that discards posts from brand new lemmy.world accounts after 3 posts in their first day. It is a rate limit, which people didn’t want, but an extremely finely targeted one that will impact just about no one.
That takes care of one of the especially annoying people who keeps making new accounts.