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:

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 ([email protected] 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.