Over the past several months, we've seen a ton of new posts published on Write.as. Much of it has been driven by our launch of ActivityPub support and people interested in starting a federated blog.

Another good portion of this growth has been driven by an audience using the platform as a pastebin for sharing links — and in some cases, for circumventing blocks of those shared links on other sites like Facebook.

We invested a significant amount of time last year months trying to keep this kind of content at bay, from manually flagging posts, to implementing rudimentary automated blocks, to even adding a reCAPTCHA test on signup — which we would really like to get rid of. Hosting vast quantities of posts like this reduces the quality of traffic we receive, fills up our database, and risks us having the write.as domain viewed as a platform for spam / malicious content. Ultimately, it can harm everyone else that uses the platform as it's intended to be used.

With these things in mind, and the fact that we're pretty settled on the current pricing, we want to try out a new change on the free plan. We're presenting this here because we'd like your feedback on whether or not it'll adversely affect you.

Proposed change

The #proposed #change is an 8 post per day limit for free users, whether registered or not. For now, this would only affect users on the web (not our other apps). Casual and Pro users would still get unlimited published posts every day.

We feel this would be a pretty good solution to the problem:

• Most regular users, who don't abuse the platform, shouldn't be affected by the limit
• Most spammers post many times throughout the day — this would prevent that
• Most spammers take advantage of the web app — this would directly address them
• Spammers take advantage of anonymous / no-sign-up publishing, which we can normally do little to prevent — this would help prevent abuse there
• Spammers generally aren't willing to pay — this forces them to do that or move on

This is just a starting number — we could imagine it eventually being reduced as low as 3 or 4, depending on your feedback. In the long-term, we also imagine this being a reason people upgrade to the Casual plan. With more people paying just $12 / year for Write.as, we can keep the price as low as we have it. If not, we may have to raise it, to make sure we remain financially sustainable.

So what do you think? Are you okay with this limit? Do you post multiple times in a day, and if so, how many times on average? Feel free to respond on our forums.