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It’s fucking irritating to have to visit the same websites you used to just fine a year or so ago now becomes slow and require you to spend a good 5-10 seconds on a fucking “confirm you are human” check (as if google and co doesn’t give us enough of that shit already). Worse, it doesn’t even work sometimes, often loops, and if you’re on a different/niche browser? Good luck.
Owners of the said websites don’t have to use this check.
What do you propose instead to combat AI companies stealing from your site?
I am trying htaccess at the moment, so far I am not getting bots in my logs. But I don’t see anything bad on using Cloudflare. But I don’t understand people hating Cloudflare for the tool they offer. I also find it annoying, hence I don’t run it on my stuff.
jesus lemmings are idiots
you’ve heard of ai crawlers? yes, no?
You’re a dumbass if you think that justifies making the internet unusable.
Look, man, the internet isn’t for users anymore, it is for bits to get blocked.
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TLDR: Because they are the best at gaming the system.
Long version
They provide a really valuable thing to hosters: protection and reliability. The promise: “we take care that your website stays online”.
Plus they have a very good caching infrastructure meaning my server isn’t under as much pressure when I usee cloudflare.
For a user this is visible in two ways: bot testing stuff and slower load time, in individual perception.
And now the downside: they’ve created a spiderweb, sitting in the middle and most things online are entangled. “But I don’t user cloudflare for my website!”? Tough luck. Some routing instance in between your users and your server might. The bit protection? Used to train various machine learning algorithms. Providing any kind of automation service online? If cloudflare marks you as something negative you’re dead, no appeal.
They are from my assessment the single most powerful Internet company existing and they are staying nearly invisible on the public radar.
They pushed themselves into every problem people had with the more complicated layer in the whole Internet thing and made it easier for users - and leverage every information byte they collect on the way.
That said: I don’t hate them; I’m just really miss trusting with this amount of power and influence centralized. They utilize the whole infrastructure to become a more engrained entity.
I’m just really miss trusting
Is there a mr trusting in the picture?
I’ll see myself out
Is this an application? ;)
Yes, an application of wordplay :D
Another thing is centralization. Cloudflare has a fuck-up? A huge swath of the internet might go offline for hours.
That goes for any CDN provider, cloud hosting provider, etc. Amazon, Akamai, and others have all suffered significant outages that knocked large swaths of the internet offline. It’s certainly nothing unique to Cloudflare.
Why not add 5 more seconds to the loading time of every website you visit?
Note: that’s just why I hate cloudflare, I have no idea why everybody else does 😝
Me personally? Because they proudly host and protect hate sites
They’re slowly becoming the necessary evil in this day and age. At least they’re not Meta, Google, Anthropic, OpenAI / Microsoft, or Amazon.
Just another US tech giant taking control of shit.
Because Matthew Prince is a psychopath.
