It's very annoying that Google's websites, including this blog, are automatically translated to my browser's preferred language.
Sillicon Valley devs clearly believe that machine translation is a magical technology that completely solved internationalization, like in Star Trek. No, it's far from it. Ever since internet has been flooded with automatically translated garbage, the experience of international users, at least bilingual ones, got much worse.
The worst offender to me is Google Maps. I'm a native Spanish speaker but set my phone to English because I hate app translations. The problem is when I want to read reviews it automatically translates them from Spanish (my native language) to English. It doesn't make any sense!
At least it's still Latin. In places like Korea, the roads are often only in transliterated Latin alphabet, so if you read the local language (and know places in that language) you'd need to transliterate it back to know what it's saying.
This despite Google already knowing what languages I can read…
Hey, at least it's preferred language. It's much worse when it bases it on the country that I'm in, which I can only reasonably influence with a VPN, and calling that reasonable is a stretch.
This is the worst. I was in France recently and tons of mobile websites were just suddenly in French. It was a real chore to read through them, and I can only imagine how frustrating this is when you can't read the language put in front of you at all.
The thing I don't get is that there are plenty of Googlers traveling internationally. They've been aware of the problem for over a decade now, yet it persists. If I'm traveling from Spain to Poland with a browser set to use UK-English, why would the site immediately switch to Polish? It makes no sense that this common corner case isn't addressed at all after all this time.
At the very least sites that do this should detect that there's a mismatch between expected language given geolocation and the header and have a toast notification about how to change the language settings back manually.
Wouldn't the alternative be worse for most people?
If you're a global company it would be silly to assume all your readers speak/read a single language. AI translations (assuming that's what this is) are not perfect, but better than nothing.
I get how poor translation could be irritating for bilingual people who notice the quality difference though, but I guess you guys have the advantage of being able to switch the language.
I have `en-US` set as the second preference language, so just show me the content in `en-US` unless you have a real human-vetted translation into my primary language.
I keep setting all my preferences *everywhere* to English, yet 50% of the time google search results are 100% Finnish. With a helpful "change to English" link that does not work.
Worst still Google Maps will insist on only showing street names, area names, an directions in Swedish.
Strong agree. I had worked at Google for four years before discovering that the API documentation I meticulously wrote was machine translated to other languages. Only by perusing these translations did I realize some API concepts had been translated; I had to overuse the backtick notation for code to suppress these translations.
This is not a just Silicon Valley problem though; Redmond had similar issues if you just use the newer parts of Windows in a non-English language.
The slow adoption of QUIC is the result of OpenSSL's refusal to expose the primitives needed by QUIC implementations that already existed in the wild. Instead, they decided to build their own NIH QUIC stack, which after all these years is still not complete.
Fortunately, this recently changed and OpenSSL 3.5 will finally provide an API for third party QUIC stacks.[1] It works differently than all the other existing implementations, as it's push-based instead of pull-based. It remains to be seen what it means for the ecosystem.
So apparently this is one person's project, but the branding makes it seem like it's some kind of official European Union initiative.
Also, I don't see what problem a national Linux distribution would solve. It would either duplicate the effort of a "normal" Linux distribution, or more likely, it would be just a rebrand of an existing distro.
This article talks about easily verifiable, objectively false information such as "Zelensky banned Truth Social in Ukraine". It just didn't happen, even Truth Social itself confirms that.[1]
You have to be deep in a misinformation bubble to characterize it as "anything you disagree with".
Ada isn't memory safe. It doesn't have anything resembling a borrow checker. The spec used to allow an optional garbage collector, but that was never widely used in practice and was removed in Ada 2012. The average production codebase relies on Unchecked_Free/Unchecked_Deallocation for memory management.
I find it genuinely baffling that so many people who praise Ada clearly don't know and/or don't use the language.
Tons of languages have soundness bugs. While that one is ten years old, there have been zero reports of it ever being found in the wild, and it will finally be fixed relatively soon.
Yes. For various other reasons, the trait system needed to be rewritten, and it would also end up fixing this. Since it’s essentially a theoretical issue, spending time on this wouldn’t make sense. In the meantime, that rewrite is nearing completion. The most recent version of rust uses it for coherence checking. The next few months are likely to remove several other stoppers from moving forward. It’s almost time for a crater run, and then fixing whatever issues that shows up.
The Rust one seems a specific bug in the implementation, while the Agda one seems more like a fundamental flaw caused by allowing aliased mutation though.
Haven't seen uncheched_deallocation in modern codebases in a long time... The secondary stack removes many/most use cases of short-lived dynamic allocation and pointer-passing. Controlled types, containers, alleviate most other use-cases. I'd frown at code review if I saw raw memory allocation. Memory safety issues I've seen (very rarely in 15 years of dev) hinge on aliasing, stack overflow (which you can mostly catch now) and tumbling down in C bindings.
I'll praise the language I use daily as far more memory-safe than the others I use daily (bar managed-memory Java-like languages).
You can't have the borrow checker without bringing the rest of SPARK with it as far as I'm aware, so this comes with the requirement that you prove the your program contains no other runtime errors.
Pointers are memory safe as long as Unchecked_Deallocation/Unchecked_Access are never used thanks to how pointers have scopes, even though pointers can be pointing to variables on the stack.
You can go a very long way without ever touching Unchecked_Deallocation compared to C or Rust, even without allowing for use of the standard library where deallocation is done under the hood. I use it rarely enough that I have to go check the package specification every time I need it.
You also have relatively safe deallocation when you wrap your allocation in a storage pool and let RAII deal with it as the pointer system keeps you safe from a dangling reference if your container type only frees memory within the Finalize procedure.
You don't have the complete memory safety of a GC or Rust's borrow checker without SPARK, but you can completely avoid the unsafe parts or use well tested containers as opposed to C and other similar language where you need unsafe pointers to do anything non-trivial.
> I had a Ryzen 1700 that didn't meet the windows 11 tpm standard.
It's not TPM, Zen1 does support TPM 2. Also, its instruction set is identical to Zen+ (Ryzen 2xxx), which is supported by Win11. After all, Zen+ was just a die shrink of Zen1 with some minor fixes.
It really seems like they blacklisted Zen1 for no real reason.
I wasn't a very active 4chan poster to begin with, but when they introduced this awful CAPTCHA, and later the 300s countdown before making the first post, I completely lost interest in using the website.
Anonymous boards were supposed to be low-friction, but now 4chan is one of the most user-hostile social media platforms around. It takes a special kind of dedication to post there, which I seriously doubt helps the quality of the site.
one of the biggest problems that 4chan has to combat is spam. unfortunately, at 4chan's scale, hcaptcha and recaptcha are not free. 4chan is not exactly a font of money, either. the only reason they turned to this awful homebrew captcha was because recaptcha stopped being free. is there any better way to do it with a single developer for a website that serves millions of people a day?
It's a bit embarrassing I even have to explain this, but yes, because racism or sexism are very important parts of 4chan's appeal: it's a place with freedom of speech. Let's be real the standards of discussion are low, but people can discuss stuff freely, which they wouldn't be able to if everything was buried under some GPT generated spam.
A lot of people think 4chan is one of the last bastions of free speech on the internet because they see a lot of racism that would normally be banned anywhere else.
But if you post something that goes against the alt-right that pisses them off too much and getting a lot of replies, it'll be deleted within minutes, or you'll even get banned for being "off topic".
4chan is not free speech, it is just a haven for the alt-right.
They do have rules and the site is quite moderated.
I do think though that any such site or platform will have the issue of judges inflecting their bias in their application of the rules.
So I wouldn't say that it is a unique phenomenon.
That said, of course there is a semantic as well as technical identity to 4chan. And they are quite connected, rather than isolated.
4chan, apart from its lax rules on what we now call hate speech, has developed a community where insults are now part of its culture. The fact that the site is anonymous greatly influences that animosity.
I like to think of 4chan not as a place where horrible people go, but where people go to be horrible. Of course you have the dedicated users, neets or schizos or chronically online, but again that's a propery of every site, and not necessarily a majority.
So if you read /pol/ or /b/ like articles of an organization with an editorial line, sure you will see nazis and a deranged group of people.
If you however see it like bathroom wall writings, you will see a bit of everyone.
There were no rules broken. Actually they selectively ignore the rule against racism as long as it is aligned with alt-right, and not just the pol board now.
That thread is about the Spanish movie "La piel que habito,"[0] and that OP post is actually describing the plot, it's not even a political post. So bringing up American Republicans out of nowhere is quite off topic. Strange how you conveniently cropped out the title and image that ostensibly showed this. Is this the best you can do?
It's not entirely unrelated to the discussion and I guarantee you if someone said something aligned with alt-right, instead it would not have been censored.
An article about 4chan from left media is something I won't read. Not a boomer, I can actually read 4chan anyways and make my own mind.
Image related is unfortunate. Not uncommon for jannies and mods in any website to use their power to self serve. It happens even in more serious and regulated sites like wikipedia, so I'm not surprised by the lack of moderation neutrality in a meme site.
> Image related is unfortunate. Not uncommon for jannies and mods in any website to use their power to self serve.
This isn't just a 1 off thing by rogue moderators is what I'm trying to point out. This is a constantly re-occurring thing. I also experienced the same issue multiple times until I got fed up with it and stopped posting there a few years ago.
Their main moderator had a goal to make 4chan politically aligned with his views. 4chan used to be free speech but it really isn't anymore.
Its not just the pol board as I showed in my other comments.
I don't use the videogame board so I do not know if anti alt-right comments there get deleted, but I find it hard to believe that anybody is going to be emotionally invested enough to delete posts that say "game X is going to succeed even when it is woke".
From a random search it looks like there's a lot of racist or alt-right aligned political comments there that never get deleted though.
This is not true. You can go to /v/ right now and see tons of pro black/trans in video games posters, and /lgbt/ is one of the largest boards on the site at 12th place by avg. posts per day.[0] Here are 3 /v/ threads I found in less than 5 seconds that are "pro woke":
1. 696014001
OP:
>Face it, it’s going to be a BG3 situation. Everyone will screech about it being woke, play it, then 6 months later everyone will say “no one called it woke, what are you talking about?”
2. 696014873
OP:
>If Japanese people are so based and anti-woke then why is this so popular in nipland? [pic of otokonoko game in image]
3. 696016309
OP:
>>9999 games cater to cis men, 1 doesn't
>>THIS IS LITERALLY GENOCIDE
(Two of these threads I found by searching the word "woke" in the catalog. The first was the first thread when I opened the page.)
In fact, these types of threads are against the rules,[1] but /v/ is somewhat evenly split between liberals and anti-liberals and liberals make these threads all day and can be seen in replies as well. They even have their own terms, eg. "Grumzcord Raid" "Grifter thread" etc. And if you knew anything about the mods and janitors you would know many are far from alt-right.
My guess is you went to /g/ and started making blatant political threads and got banned. Note that both sides get banned for blatant off topic political posts. Do you have any examples of posts you were banned for?
The mods won't ban or delete 1 off posts that don't get any traction. And I'm talking about pol, the #1 board on the site by activity.
And no I don't visit g, if I wanted some discussion about technology I'd rather use this website instead. I'm not going to show any of my own examples for privacy purposes, and no doubt you will probably find some way to nit pick at those.
>mods won't ban or delete 1 off posts that don't get any traction
Janitors don't delete posts that they don't see or are not reported.
>I'm talking about pol, the #1 board on the site by activity.
/vg/ is neck and neck with /pol/, and that's only because /v/ was split into /v/ and /vg/.
And yeah, if you don't give any examples it's hard to take you seriously. The example you did give was egregiously OT, and in fact potentially thread-derailing. The fact that you saw that as an example of janitors being unfair puts your credibility into question. I showed that liberal opinions are allowed and even common on 4chan, which was your initial point. I don't browse /pol/ but I found liberal threads pretty easily here as well:
490048710 (99 replies)
OP:
>Calmly explain why pissing off these countries [in OP pic] will result in untold riches for the working class [countries are China, Canada and Mexico, in reference to Trump's tariffs]
490048788 (103 replies)
OP:
>Is Trump the last gasp of a dying empire?
>He's going hard, threatening every country in the world with huge tariffs and massive retaliation if they use currencies other than the US dollar. It's rather absurd. [post continues for another 3 paragraphs]
I don't think 4chan is necessarily a bastion of free speech. Twitter is probably more free in terms on what you can post now. However 4chan is nothing like Reddit, old twitter, YouTube etc. in terms of what you can post.
> Janitors don't delete posts that they don't see or are not reported.
So why is it that any alt-right or racist posts never get deleted? Even if they only deal with things that get reported to them, there's clearly a huge bias going on here when alt-right aligned posts never get reported while the opposite is reported and dealt with within minutes.
> And yeah, if you don't give any examples it's hard to take you seriously. The example you did give was egregiously OT, and in fact potentially thread-derailing. The fact that you saw that as an example of janitors being unfair puts your credibility into question.
I believe I've given plenty of other examples not my own. I don't want to bring in my own examples because I don't want to be arguing about politics on this website, especially since I am not using a throwaway account like you are.
If the example I gave was egregiously OT, then so are all the dozens of race and politic baiting posts aligned with the alt-right that never ever seem to get the same treatment.
And for posts be deleted quickly, it needs to piss enough people off. The examples you used are the most softball examples that are not too aggressively worded and makes it more likely that alt-right users try and refute the claim rather than a knee jerk "report and sage".
Also tariffs are more of a tangential viewpoint rather than one exactly opposed to the alt-right.
The thing is, addressing the spam and also allowing users to have a low friction experience would be the first step to addressing the concerns you mentioned (without compromising the purpose of the site: anonymous and totally free speech).
There aren't many places for the people that share the views you mentioned to go other than sites like 4chan, so even though there's an awful captcha, they're going to be quite dedicated as they don't have many mainstream options elsewhere.
I believe if users were able to have a frictionless experience, then it'd reduce the chances of someone throwing their hands up in the air and saying, "this isn't worth it". I've actually attempted to reply to threads to challenge the views of others, but once I'm hit with the 300-1000 second wait time to post, I just close the tab and move on.
This problem is a societal one, it mostly harms you indirectly by creating spaces for hateful ideas to spread, 4chan's harm is through the capacity to organize and strengthen hateful and harmful political movements. More socially conscious people not visiting the site only serves to create a stronger echo chamber.
Plainly to you, but not to me. What isn't obvious to everyone, isn't really obvious. You didn't care to explain what kind of stopping mechanisms are there, that make it not a slippery slope.
I'd say rather than there being *a risk* of descending too low on that slippery slope, we already have plenty of evidence this already happened. I'm from Poland and recently a party in ruling coalition proposed criminalizing hate speech on the Internet. Fortunately, precisely the slippery slope rhetoric, supported by evidence from countries like UK, seems to be enough of a backlash to stop politicians from following such ideas.
The fact you think some ideas are "harmful" is exactly why humanity needs sites like these. We don't trust people like you to determine which ideas are "harmful" and which aren't, which ideas are worth spreading and which aren't. We want to see for ourselves, thank you very much.
We are especially interested in the ideas that people deem offensive enough to suppress. Are they actually wrong or are they just socially unacceptable? Whatever the truth is, it can't be learned from a place that suppresses discussion of it. Declaring the matter as settled and suppressing any opposing viewpoint is the very definition of an echo chamber.
You're saying national socialism is not harmful? /pol/, /b/, and tons of other boards constantly spawn threads glorifying nazi germany and vilifying other ethnicities and women, using rhetoric calling for people belonging to these groups to be killed.
Violent far-right groups use these threads as a pool for recruitment. These far-right groups cause real societal harm through violent crime and shifting the view on violent policies against minorities.
I am not using an abstract moral argument when I say these ideas cause harm, I'm arguing based on objectively observed effects that the loose ethical norms of a liberal democratic society would unambiguously deem harmful.
> You're saying national socialism is not harmful?
Everything with the word "socialism" in it is harmful.
> vilifying other ethnicities and women, using rhetoric calling for people belonging to these groups to be killed
Unfiltered hate like that is a property of humanity itself. It is not at all exclusive to the so called internet hate machine. If you look closely, you'll find that plenty of "virtuous" people are capable of just as much hate, if not more. I've personally witnessed it.
If you're not answering the argument, that's fine. But let's acknowledge that you did not answer the argument and are now just spouting the rhetoric of the far-right movement I'm describing.
I won't acknowledge anything. Your argument was not convincing. It was actually the perfect example of an attempt to suppress socially unacceptable views.
You singled those people out as "harmful" because they call for the deaths of "other ethnicities and women". Implicit in your world view is the idea that these people wouldn't also do such things. The idea that these groups are the blameless and virtuous victims, deserving of special protection against these "harmful" words and ideas. That's the part of your argument that I chose to attack.
I chose to attack that idea because I've personally seen people from these "virtuous" groups post some of the most concentrated, unfiltered and unabashed hate speech I've ever seen. I witnessed them call for deaths of entire groups, including those I'm part of, with a clean conscience. I was there when they laughed at the very few people who tried to hold them accountable for it. Not only did they not suffer any consequences, people actually made excuses for such behavior and treated it as though it was justified. Their openly hateful behavior actually empowered them.
I will never forget that as long as I live. I straight up archived those social media threads to ensure the internet never forgets. I even posted those archives here years ago when people asked me for examples. If I cared enough I bet I could even dig up those archive links from my post history.
I didn't care to dig up those links because I've yet to see a single person get outraged by this sort of behavior when it comes from these groups. I have no reason to believe you will be the exception.
They post things like "KILL ALL MEN" verbatim and people make excuses for it. Well, I'm not interested in hearing excuses today. I decided to try and make you realize that hate is a normal human emotion instead. My argument to you is that hate is a perfectly normal human emotion. It's part of the human condition. It's not at all exclusive to 4chan's politics board, oh no. People hate. Everyone hates. Even people on this very site will hate and openly call for the deaths of other humans if presented with a juicy enough target. Don't doubt it, for I have seen it happen.
By the way, dang has rate limited my account to about 5 posts every 2 hours because I would get into too many arguments just like this one. He's actually right and when I contacted him about it I asked him to keep the account rate limited. So you will excuse me if I don't reply further to this thread.
I understand that this issue seems to create a strong emotional reaction in you. That does not excuse you from the consequences of those strong emotional reactions.
I feel like you have massively extrapolated the argument from what the original point was. My response was about how "avoiding 4chan" does not shield you from the effects that 4chan has (including harm).
I don't know which groups you belong to (because you don't mention them), but we clearly agree that violent rhetoric is bad, so why are we disagreeing? It seems you have the exact same point of view as me in the general case of hateful rhetoric, but simply feel that some groups are more important (because you belong to them, perhaps? this is the feeling I get).
Also, let's not kid ourselves, violent crime (including murder) and oppression towards women and minorities are well-documented and studied real-life issues. Violence towards men by "virtuous" groups (leftists?) does not even register on the scale when compared to them. The online violent rhetoric towards women is also at several orders of magnitude higher than violent rhetoric towards men. There is a clear disproportionate aspect to this issue that your emotional reaction is not taking into account.
Magnitudes do not matter. Right and wrong are not based on statistics. I will not excuse their behavior by citing statistics.
It's very simple. We have 4chan people. We have "virtuous" people: women and minorities. I have witnessed the virtuous express hate with complete impunity. Therefore Anonymous should not be punished for doing the same thing.
Nothing emotional about it. I'm simply incapable of the cognitive dissonance necessary to accept the idea that some people get to hate freely while others don't. It is easier to accept the idea that hate is a normal and universal human emotion which will manifest everywhere where humans are present.
That's the price you pay for ability to freely and anonymously voice different opinions. And even then 4chan is considered "soft", because mods still delete some egregiously "incorrect" opinions.
>No, the other reason they're using this is to make it so annoying that you'll spend $20/yr to buy a 4chan pass to bypass it.
I think this is a really cynical outlook, especially for a website that is not run as a modern tech-centric company. 4chan's roots are in that of the Old Internet, where it is a creative and messy and interesting place to be. why would they be banking solely on using a terrible captcha as a method to drive user subscriptions, when they have the option to run circus-tent ads? if making money was their sole purpose, why would they not kick the problematic and porn boards to the curb and ban the use of slurs to make room for more friendly advertisers? there are so many other avenues to increase profitability that most websites have taken which 4chan has staunchly refused to follow. why would they choose only the 4chan pass and ads as their only opportunity at making money?
You're reading a lot into my reply. The GP's question was "is there any better way to [avoid the captcha] with a single developer?".
That's clearly the case. As a trivial example, 4chan could take your $20 and avoid giving you a captcha for 2 years, or charge you $10 for one year.
Both are a 2x improvement, if the only goal is to get past the necessary evil of the captcha.
But that clearly isn't the goal, that doesn't mean I'm begrudging 4chan their business model, that's something you grabbed out of thin air.
why would they not kick the
problematic and porn boards
to the curb and ban the use
of slurs to make room for more
friendly advertisers?
How would that be a realistic alternative for the "single developer "? The entire selling point of 4chan is that it's a very limited time capsule of the old Internet wild west.
What you're describing would be a Reddit or Facebook groups clone. If 4chan became that, nobody would use it. They'd just use Reddit or Facebook groups.
The link between spam protection and payment is well documented and as old as the internet.
Consider the origins of bitcoin and PoW have been as a currency to stop email spam.
I do agree that the incentive is probably not to make money, but to deter spam. That said after so many times the company has been sold, I wouldn't disregard that theory
Companies centered around communities don't generally have leeway to shape their communities into a profitable form by directly altering the fabric of the community. Time and again it has been shown that forcing changes to the identity of a space leads to communities' rapid demise. In rare circumstances and with a skilled hand a community can be guided here and there in even some significant ways, but 4chan probably does not have that option: they'd need a massive shift to pull off what you describe.
Instead profit must generally be built around what is there. But whether or not such communities exist to make profit, they surely must be profitable, or they will not survive. They must, some time or another, be free of deficit. This is not a matter of capitalist greed for most communities, but an attempt to find a path towards stability.
> keep the annoying captcha, but don't show one again for the lifetime of a cookie
This is already being done, there's a cookie and heuristics in place that will give you an easier captcha or occasionally skip it entirely. But 4chan really does have a couple (and I truly mean a small amount of super super dedicated users) of bad actors who constantly spam and try to work around any roadblocks given to annoy the rest of the userbase. You cannot give them a reliable way to spam no matter what. That's why there's now many country and region blocks in addition to your standard VPN/DC IP range blocks. Plus the Cloudflare check added a couple years ago.
Do a Web search for "4Chan CAPTCHA" sometime. All the top results will likely be people complaining about how terrible it is. You're certainly not alone.
The worst part about the countdown: if you wait too long to make a post after waiting the 10 minutes (eg: you get distracted,) it will expire, and you have to wait another 10 minutes.
The addition of the post countdown has had a pretty noticeable effect on posts/day across multiple boards: https://4stats.io/
When an earlier version was trialled on /biz/ (mandatory email verification - https://warosu.org/biz/thread/58388587), it nuked the board and it hasn't recovered.
You need accounts with unique emails to post everywhere else, and those sites are massive with hundreds/thousands of devs, some of whom work exclusively on anti-spam. If you make a site immune to advertising revenue and any other source of profit, you’re going to struggle to pay for “internet-scale” efforts.
Twitter is extremely user hostile. Every time I've made an account it has inevitability asked for an email and a phone number, and at least a few captchas.
Reddit and Twitter both have huge bot problems. On Reddit it's a bit less obvious due to the upvote/downvote system, and on Twitter it's a bit less obvious because you usually only follow people you want to see. Make a post on Twitter that mentions something like cryptocurrency, and you'll get a dozen bot replies immediately.
recaptcha is terrible if you are cursed with an ISP that Google deems icky for some indiscernible reason. at the time, I was getting slowly fading bullshit that invariably gaslit me with "try again" several times. when they've switched to custom captcha, I actually started posting again instead of just lurking.
yeah, the recent 5-15 minute countdown before your first post is a bizarre thing, but I assume the volume of spam and ban-evading schizos they're dealing with is ungodly. a single dedicated shithead can shit up a general or a slow board indefinitely by just resetting their router or switching airplane mode on/off for a few minutes when they get banned.
>but now 4chan is one of the most user-hostile social media platforms around.
virtually every single big platform requires your phone number.
Same here. the captcha is the tip of the iceberg. VPNs , proxies...all blocked. Tons of ghosting and censoring of posts too. Also crawling with feds and people trying to get you to incriminate yourself. I love the option to bypass it with crypto. Yeah, like I am going to give them btc, which will be traced by every agency and coin analysis firm and also get my wallet/exchange account restricted by being linked to 4chan. The owners more than happy to comply with every 3-letter agency request for info.
It's mostly porn nowadays but through some chain of events, /b/ actually is ideologically one of the most normal boards on the site now. Not even kidding. Many - probably most - other boards are majority Trumpists or neo-Nazis but /b/ is roughly at least 50% liberal or libertarian.
So politics threads in /b/ are actually better than in a ton of other boards.
I don't get why they added that nasty "feature" to the post form, it really discourages you to post(maybe it's because they want to sell you their 4chan pass), I don't understand why 4chan is still active
Presumably, anyone who regularly uses 4chan would register. Once you register and click the login link in your email, you just get the easy Cloudflare captcha and no countdown.
The horrible captcha + 300s countdown is for completely unauthed users. Most sites don't even allow unauthed users to post at all.
If you don't get it, you probably don't spend too much time on 4chan.
There is A LOT of ban evasion on 4chan. If you have a dynamic IP address from your ISP, you just spam/derail threads with personal crusades/whatever until you get banned, reset your router and repeat.
This countdown increases the cost of ban evasion, since you can't get right back in to continue. Everyone on your targeted board/thread now gets at least a 15-minute respite.
They've also had to blacklist entire ISP from making any posts because some people are constantly ban evading on them. Especially mobile ISPs, where there's basically an unlimited amount of fresh IPv6 addresses available.
Russia is already performing data poisoning attacks on LLMs: https://www.newsguardrealitycheck.com/p/a-well-funded-moscow...