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
No you cannot! I blocked all of the user agents on a community wiki I run, and the traffic came back hours later masquerading as Firefox and Chrome. They just fucking lie to you and continue vacuuming your CPU.

>>mplewi+lu1
There shouldn't be any noticeable hit on your cpu from bots from a site like that. Are you sure it's not a DDoS?

Obviously it depends on the bot, and you can't block the scammy ones. I was really just referring to the major legitimate companies (which might not include Perplexity).