[shadowgovt]

You're going by the specified, designed use cases of those technologies.

Every spec is a three-edged sword: the spec, the intent of the spec, and the use of the spec in the wild.

In practice, Cloudflare does a pretty good job on far-more-than average of gluing together some heuristics in an unspec'd way to filter traffic. It sucks because you can't plan around it, but that's rather the point because the malicious actors are trying to plan around it also.

(ETA: Hacker News rate-limited this post. In theory, I could have set up a sock-puppet to try and work around that, but then they would catch that too and I'd be out two accounts. So I just waited out the limit. Measure and counter-measure. ;) ).

[dontupvoteme]

Why does HN have such aggressive and seemingly illogical post rate limits anyway?

Is it a theory about increasing quality of communications? It can't be a tech bottleneck.

[shadowgovt]

I don't have this information first hand, but that's my assumption.

Dang was handing them out like candy on January 6th. And I think he was justified in doing so; there was a coup in progress in the United States, so discourse here went completely off the rails.

But it's a very easy to implement method of throttling volume, which helps improve the conversation by minimizing opportunities for people to gish-gallop. You can email and ask to have it removed; I have refrained from doing so because it serves as a gentle reminder not to get dragged down in the lowest common denominator of what passes for discourse on the site from time to time.