zlacker

>>meetpa+(OP)
I've noticed that in recent months, even apart from these outages, cloudflare has been contributing to a general degradation and shittification of the internet. I'm seeing a lot more "prove you're human", "checking to make sure you're human", and there is normally at the very least a delay of a few seconds before the site loads.

I don't think this is really helping the site owners. I suspect it's mainly about AI extortion:

https://blog.cloudflare.com/introducing-pay-per-crawl/

>>cpncru+Qo
You call it extortion of the AI companies, but isn’t stealing/crawling/hammering a site to scrape their content to resell just as nefarious? I would say Cloudflare is giving these site owners an option to protect their content and as a byproduct, reduce their own costs of subsidizing their thieves. They can choose to turn off the crawl protection. If they aren't, that tells you that they want it, doesn’t it?

>>james2+Br
>You call it extortion of the AI companies, but isn’t stealing/crawling/hammering a site to scrape their content to resell just as nefarious?

You can easily block ChatGPT and most other AI scrapers if you want:

https://habeasdata.neocities.org/ai-bots

>>cpncru+TK
I'm guessing you don't manage any production web servers?

robots.txt isn't even respected by all of the American companies. Chinese ones (which often also use what are essentially botnets in Latin American and the rest of the world to evade detection) certainly don't care about anything short of dropping their packets.