Surely no brand is more hated by web users that Cloudflare
The only time they see it is when it impedes their access to a site. Yet still the operator emblazons this brand on the interstitial. Why? Does he think he's Tony Stark in Sokovia, or what?
The only time they see it is when it impedes their access to a site. Yet still the operator emblazons this brand on the interstitial. Why? Does he think he's Tony Stark in Sokovia, or what?
Discussion Highlights (12 comments)
kgraves
Users don't care about Cloudflare and I think you need to go outside. Either you're in a bubble or you're an AI or both.
SyntaxErrorist
It’s ironic how Cloudflare, meant to improve security and performance, ends up causing frustration for so many users when it blocks access to sites.
digitalPhonix
Cloudflare feels like yet another tech company living too long and becoming the villain. Early Cloudflare days I moved all the infrastructure I was responsible for over to them for being so developer friendly. Now they are both developer unfriendly (eg. horror stories around pricing and plan swaps) and consumer unfriendly with way more frequent intersitals than I remember from ~5 years ago. I think every time I log in to GitLab I get a Cloudflare check. Doesn’t matter if I’m on a residential connection, starbucks, airport or VPN.
rafram
Because end users don’t have any ability to avoid sites that use Cloudflare, and it’s free advertising every time a developer sees it. Sure, you might hate Cloudflare on everyone else’s sites, but it’s nice to have it on your side!
csomar
As someone running a web app, I can see the appeal. I get tens of thousands of "attacks" per day from bots scanning for WordPress/PHP files and that's not even counting the "legitimate" bot traffic crawling your site for content or AI training data. Now, tens of thousands of requests probably won't do much if you have basic security, caching, and optimization in place. But if your app is a mess, sometimes it's easier to just slap a Cloudflare gate on it and call it a day.
troyforster
It is a lot less annoying than cookie banners.
skybrian
Are most web users inconvenienced at all? People on Hacker News aren't typical, which probably results in installing more privacy-preserving technologies that trigger captchas.
grebc
I find it very annoying.
OutOfHere
There are more reasons to hate it. It has a deserved bad reputation of extortion of certain users for no good reason when it believes those users to be too dependent to move away. It is known to do this extortion by suddenly asking them for a lot more money. Another valid reason to hate it is because it MITMs a good chunk of web data, with a strong potential to leak it all to the government without a warrant.
DougN7
I wonder what I do differently. I never see a Cloudflare page - completely forgot that was a thing. It’s been years since I’ve seen one.
roncesvalles
Google's captcha (the one where you select the squares) is just such a painful experience, I actually get excited when I see Cloudflare's captcha. I'd estimate my Cmd+W rate when I see a gCaptcha is at least 25%.
liviux
Cloudflare helps so much for free, they are the good guys. Try harder to find someone to hate if that's what you seek