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Comment by r00f | Hacker News Reader

It is not Cloudflare's fault. It means the website operators were so fed up with bots and bad actors that they just applied a carpet ban and called it a day. Thanks to Cloudflare I was able to reduce my website load threefold and downscale my VMs and my monthly cloud bill, and seeing how 50k daily requests were shown CAPTCHA and not even tried to solve it makes me terrified of running anything without Cloudflare.

Don't blame site owners and service that is trying to help them. Blame the fact that 90% of today's Internet traffic is bots

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If I click on a search result and it shows me a CloudFlare CAPTCHA I leave. Immediately and permanently. I get what you are saying but also you will not get a dime from me if I have to waste my time solving a CAPTCHA prompt that half the time is so broken it just gets stuck in a loop.

I guess whatever revenue you lose you make up for in a lower hosting bill. I just go to your competitor that doesn’t have the horrible UX. Usually those websites also tend to have much more optimized web pages too so it is an all around better experience.

Of course it's cloudflare's fault. They monetized and scaled a service that blocks humans from interacting with websites.

They're also essentially a deanonymization reverse proxy that can track everyone's browsing history and decide whether you get to see websites based on social credit.

And it is in their financial interest to block. They would rather not spend their bandwidth.

That I'm not so sure about. If they get too block-happy they'll lose customers.

But I don't think they care if they block firefox users, or people who delete cookies, or VPN users, or Tor users, or people who resist fingerprinting, or people who block ads, etc.

It's cloudlare's fault that it's so common to have very overzealous blocking. Site owners need access to bot protection but that doesn't mean highly flawed protection gets to be blameless.

That reads more like:

- site owners can have protection as long as it doesn't inconvenience me.

Close.

Replace "me" with "legitimate users" and replace "inconvenience" with "very aggressively inconvenience or entirely block".

Then yeah you have it.

I mean, yeah that is what it is. You can have “protection” or you can have me as a customer. I am not here to solve broken CAPTCHAs all day long.

> It means the website operators were so fed up with bots and bad actors that they just applied a carpet ban and called it a day.

Many of my websites get 98% of their traffic from bots and bad actors, but it doesn’t really matter because the extra load of all these fake requests is absolutely negligible. I have a hard time understanding how someone would be bothered by an extra 50k requests a day. That’s less than a request per second. Most of the sites on even the weakest VM’s can easily do 10r/s these days.

I mean if I have 1 service sure but I have 20+ different one

if someone can foot the bill then I happily let them use it for free but its coming from own pocket

I've tried going to sites to buy things and been met with Cloudflare CAPTCHA, only to immediately leave and buy what I wanted elsewhere.

Won't anubis do the same?

ANUBIS = Annoying Normal Users, Barely Inconveniencing Scrapers

Scrapers started to solve PoW?

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