the blacked out minimalist aesthetic on this site looks really cool
Breaking the 4Chan CAPTCHA
101–110 of 378 posts
Re: Breaking the 4Chan CAPTCHA
#102I 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 q…
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?
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.
Re: Breaking the 4Chan CAPTCHA
#103I 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 q…
but now 4chan is one of the most user-hostile social media platforms around Stay off /v/, /tv/, /pol/, and /a/ and you’ll have a pretty good time.
certainly won't have a good time on /b/ either
Re: Breaking the 4Chan CAPTCHA
#104Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
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.
GP said "one of the biggest problems", not "the biggest problem"
Re: Breaking the 4Chan CAPTCHA
#105Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 l…
>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 me…
Doing so would destroy the culture of 4chan.
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.
Re: Breaking the 4Chan CAPTCHA
#106Jesus looking at both example captchas... as a human... i have no fucking clue the answer lol
You get used to them, there are various heuristics built in that make them easier then they at first appear.
I initially wrote the alignment-only script (in the source repo as `user-scripts/4chan-captcha-aligner.ts`) before the rest of the project because the person who was collecting the data manually for me couldn't wrap their head around the slider-style CAPTCHAs. There's definitely a learning curve.
Re: Breaking the 4Chan CAPTCHA
#107the blacked out minimalist aesthetic on this site looks really cool
I really like it too. I'm always excited to see the themes of personal and other tech blogs I come across here.
Re: Breaking the 4Chan CAPTCHA
#108Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
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.
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.
Re: Breaking the 4Chan CAPTCHA
#109There is a reason why people moved away from distorted text based captcha. We are basically at the point where computers are better at them then humans. https://www.usenix.org/system/files/conference/woot14/woot14... is a paper on the subject i think is really interesting However a surprising amount of text based captchas can be solved in a few line shell script of, using imagemagik to convert to greyscale, dilate an…
Just because you can technically crack them doesn't mean they're useless. There's a significant amount of time, skill and effort that went into the solution from this post, and the end result doesn't generalize well (you'd have to start all over for a different kind of captcha). The vast majority of spammers would not be able to replicate this; those who do would either make money legitimately, or focus their skills…
> there are other options that pay much better than spamming
Are there? Say you've got a felony record and can't get a legit AI/ML job at eg OpenAI/anywhere. What would you do instead? most of the options I can think of involve getting paid for doing things that are basically spam if you zoom out enough.
Re: Breaking the 4Chan CAPTCHA
#110Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
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.
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.