[crazygringo]

Just curious -- if a country didn't want a site to be seen, why would they rate-limit it instead of just blocking connections completely?

Is that a thing countries do, like if they want to "punish" a site while retaining plausible deniability?

[Liru]

People's attention spans are ridiculously short. If the person is actively looking for the content, sure, that obviously won't work. However, if it's a more casual browser, then going to a site that takes a long time to load between different pages is definitely a way to get them to not visit it any more. This even works on tech-savvy people, as opposed to just blocking a site which will just get them to use a proxy.

> Is that a thing countries do, like if they want to "punish" a site while retaining plausible deniability?

China and Russia do this with a lot of western sites, from what I've heard.

[opportune]

Yes: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22541960

I have seen this actually happen IRL

[crazygringo]

Thanks so much for the link. That was really educational, answered my question completely.

[jedberg]

It would be too obvious. If you can't get to the site you know it's blocked. If it's just super slow all the time, you won't know why and may just get frustrated and leave.