Comment by dlcarrier
8 hours ago
Inevitably the internet will have two types of users:
1. The anti-bot bots that must stop you from proceeding, because they aren't entirely sure you aren't a bot
and
2. The bots that can get past them, which we all must eventually deploy, if we want a chance to visit a web page
Why would anyone ever want to solve 99 Cloudflare captchas a day if you can get a bot to do it instead?
Literally used an LLM to answer the latest one 20 minutes ago, which was "what can climb a tree".
Cloudflare is a blight on the internet, but HN loves it.
Cloudflare just started blocking Googlebot, so maybe we'll see an exodus away from Cloudflare by people who want their sites indexed? Hopefully?
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Cloudflare spreads everywhere and kills the drive to do nice things. It is akin to a disease.
The question is, what is the alternative to cloudflare? We've tried (to various degrees) user id, micropayments, device attestation... I'm not hopeful we can actually solve this. Maybe if there was a neutral, "NGO-like" cloudflare of some sort?
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It's like the good old joke about a bear-proof trash can.
There is now a considerable overlap between the capabilities of the dumbest users and the smartest AIs.
> but HN loves it
There is popular sentiment on HN that CF is making internet worse by being a core infrastructure element most websites use.
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Early 2000’s they turned of PUBLIC tv here. To receive public funded TV you now need a digital subscription. I never thought this would happen to the internet, as in… its becoming more of an intranet everyday.
yes, but it can be not so grim - we just need to equip everyone with the means to grow their own local webs, and find a way to connect them by p2p. call it Mycelial Web: federation of local webs that grows by processing the dead material of the open web into personal http worlds grown in containers.