Comment by pmdr
3 hours ago
> It is not CloudFlare that is ruining the Internet, but the spammers and attackers.
Spammers have been around since forever and it used to be the webmaster/sysadmin's responsibility to deal with spam in a way that would not hinder user experience. With Cloudflare all that responsibility is aggressively passed on to the user, cumulatively wasting _years_.
As for attackers, I wonder if Cloudflare publishes data showing how many of the billions of websites it "protects" have experienced a significant attack. They don't offer free protection to save the internet, but rather for control -- and no single company should have this much control.
> Spammers have been around since forever
Is the fallacy here not obvious? Yes, spammers have been around since forever, but it's not the same amount of spammers. Whether it's two spammers or two million spammers does make a difference.
I think we're long past peak spam. A lot of them seem to have given up due to the rise of SPF and DKIM, and also because people don't really use email so much anymore as a serious form of communication.
I remember some clients in the mid 2000s. They got several spam emails per minute on some accounts. Not kidding. I haven't seen anything like that in recent years.
The responsibility is passed to Cloudflare, and that's the point. Not every site can make a capable solution by themselves.
The responsibility now lies on the user, who has to click through confirmations to prove they are human, thus making their experience a lot worse. It has been my experience the last ten years.