Comment by concinds
4 years ago
I think a downside of their CEO & C-level spending so much time on Twitter and HN (spending any time there at all is already "a lot" for C-suite) is that they might overestimate the size and importance of social media mobs. Practically every hashtag is botted these days, especially ones people feel passionate about.
The crux is that even if IT decisionmakers have become more left-wing and pro-top-down-control, they're still very unlikely to ever pick Cloudflare even after they complied. Best solution is to ignore.
I agree, I think in his attempt to be overly transparent he's made himself a target for these social media mobs. At the end of the day he's a businessman and if his business' financial needs require it to shut websites down then that's unfortunate but that's life as a business. But to air out all their thoughts and deliberations makes them seem vulnerable to persuasion efforts.
I actually think the other half of the reason why Cloudflare became such a target is because of their 404 cloudflare site that displays when the origin host goes offline. It's essentially an ad for cloudflare, there is no technical need for them to show this. Only: if my site protected by akamai goes down, I dont believe my users will see that it was protected by akamai. It's just offline. The best protection cloudflare has is to stop making it so easy to see who is protected by them. In fact, they should even stop giving out information on who they are protecting and put it into their TOS that social media sites are not allowed to broadcast the fact that they are protected by cloudflare.
These would be practical steps to massively help Cloudflare mitigate further risks.