[alekratz]

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?

[joe-collins]

Not the rampant racism or sexism or simple misanthropy or outright calls to violence or overflowing hostility.

It's the spam that tops the problem list.

[Etherlord87]

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.

[sky2224]

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.

[ChadNauseam]

GP said "one of the biggest problems", not "the biggest problem"

[krmboya]

> Not the rampant racism or sexism or simple misanthropy or outright calls to violence or overflowing hostility.

Isn't that more easily solved by just not visiting the site in the first place?

[skotobaza]

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.

[avar]

    > is there any better way to do
    > it with a single developer for
    > a website that serves millions
    > of people a day?

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.

If you're not making your free website annoying to drive revenue there's obvious ways to make it less annoying.

E.g. keep the annoying captcha, but don't show one again for the lifetime of a cookie, validate users who can make a money transfer of $0.01 etc.

[alekratz]

>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?

[Anon1096]

> 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.