Comment by ethan_smith

There's a fundamental tension here between scale and openness. Cloudflare's bot detection likely relies on statistical models[1] trained on mainstream browser behavior. When you operate at their scale, even a 0.1% false positive rate affects millions (billions?) of users, but the economic incentives push toward minimizing false negatives (actual bots getting through to prevent leaking) rather than false positives (real users getting blocked).

The real issue isn't just Cloudflare - it's the centralization of web infrastructure that creates these single points of failure for browser diversity. Alternative browsers aren't just about personal preference - they're essential for innovation and preventing technological monoculture. We should be demanding transparent criteria for what constitutes "suspicious" behavior rather than accepting black-box filtering.

[1] https://developers.cloudflare.com/bots/plans/biz-and-ent/#he...