alt Hacker NewsIt’s a bit alarming how cloudflare is establishing itself as arbiter of all things bots…both on blocking and allowing.
Doesn’t seem healthy for the internet as a whole
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Yes, but it’s up to their competitors to build competing services.
They're creating optional opt-in protection layers for the services they operate.
I genuinely don't understand these generic complaint comments.
Are you complaining that they offer too much? Or do you believe nobody is offering similar services?
It's business as usual and it's our job to vote with our wallets.
Agreed, but we should be honest, the internet today is far from healthy
Apart from handling of abuse reports. Yeah we're acting as CDN for this phishing site - we'll just inform the upstream about it and do nothing.
For any one of their product there is a good opportunity to build an open source alternative or something like it! Can be hard to work around they have the benefit of being able to have negative unit economics on lots of infra products... But people succesfully built tons of alternatives to google analytics and similar.
Unfortunately a common occurrence in the world. Not really a fan of cloudflare selling to both sides.
have you considered the alternative ?
where bots run rampant ?
trust me as an operator - I'm grateful Cloudflare exists.
It's really telling that they're starting to block anything automated ever that hasn't gone through their ID verification process. It's like literally every company that exists in the world is taking advantage of the dystopia at once
To be frank, their products do work and are sorely needed.
...but very bullish NET. who wouldn't want to be the toll booth where you collect money both ways
Gonna zag here. If you take a step back, cloudflare has been paving the path for pay for crawl. I think it's a noble and ambitious goal.
While I can understand why you would be alarmed, I can point to almost two decades of lamenting on this forum about how we need better ways of rewarding content creators than ads. Well, this is it.
Moreover, these products weren't built in a vacuum. Most threads about Anthropic and OpenAI have complaints about how these companies were built on stolen content. There's a reality we have to face here and we can't have it both ways.