Or maybe don’t “hate” folks who are just trying to put some content online and don’t want to deal with botnets taking down their work? You know, like what the internet was intended for.
> don’t want to deal with botnets taking down their work
Botnets and automated crawling are completely different things. This isn't about preventing service degradation (even if it gets presented that way). It's an attempt by content publishers to control who accesses their content and how.
Cloudflare is actively assisting their customers to do things I view as unethical. Worse, only Cloudflare (or someone in a similarly central position) is capable of doing those things in the first place.
Internet was certainly not intended for centralization. I hit Cloudflare captchas and error pages so often it's almost sickening. So many things are behind Cloudflare, things you least expect to be behind Cloudflare.
It's easy enough to bypass most Cloudflare “anti-bot” with an unusual refresh pattern or messing with a cookie. (It's easier to script this than solve the CAPTCHAs.)
Anyone malicious who is determined enough will just pay their way through any captcha. Yet for me, as a legitimate user, these "one more step" pages feel downright humiliating. At this point, if I see one, I either just nope out of it, or look for a saved copy on archive.org.
