[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.