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Cloudflare: let's give the bots their own accounts so they can scrape harder. Also Cloudflare: let's send normal humans who are trying to go about their daily
by Hackbraten 4mo ago
Cloudflare: let's give the bots their own accounts so they can scrape harder.
Also Cloudflare: let's send normal humans who are trying to go about their daily lives into endless Turnstile spinner loops with absolutely zero recourse, grievance, or support infrastructure.
- jwr 4mo agoI had similar thoughts: "let's convince everyone to outsource the decision on who can access their websites to us, because BOTS BOTS BOTS" and "let's make life easier for bots to do things".
- moritzruth 4mo agoFirst you spread the disease, then you sell the cure.
- deadbabe 4mo agoI think this is more of a “keep friends close but enemies closer” type thing.
- throw1234567891 4mo agoSounds more like “let’s make money twice”.
- TeMPOraL 4mo agoIt's business so they have neither enemies nor friends, just various breeds of cattle to milk.
- isodev 4mo agoBut think of the shareholders
- deadbabe 4mo agoAnyone can be a shareholder.
- horacemorace 4mo ago[flagged]
- copperx 4mo agoI thought there were no rich swes anymore?
- skinfaxi 4mo agoThat's unnecessarily presumptuous.
- deadbabe 4mo agoCloudflare is in the S&P500. If you have a 401k diversified in broad market indexes then most likely… you are a shareholder.
- Denzel 4mo agoAbout half of US households don’t have any retirement at all. Making their point that “shareholders” are a distinct class separate from the whole of the population.
- j45 4mo agoIt's a clean way to charge AI to read content too.
- IncreasePosts 4mo agoI'm sure they don't want humans to have that experience - the issue is that the human behavior looks very bot-like. This is usually only experienced by people whose setup is peculiar
- Anamon 4mo agoYes, and using Firefox or having an ad blocker installed counts as extremely peculiar these days.
- bornfreddy 4mo agoJust had 10 rounds of busses, motorcycles and fire hydrants with Google before I decided I don't actually want to see that page so much. So Cloudflare is unfortunately not the only offender here.
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- Anamon 4mo agoThere's a certain type of Recaptcha challenge (the 4x4 single-photo one) that I have a 100% failure rate on. If Google decide to serve me 15 of those in a row, I will invariably fail 15 times until they decide to serve one of the other types for round 16. I'm very close to believing that that challenge is actually bugged and unsolvable for everyone, and simply nobody ever bothered to fix it.
- bornfreddy 4mo agoNah, I think this is Google's way of pushing against those who value privacy. Firefox? With uBO? No cookies? Not fetching Google fonts? Must be a bot for sure. /s
- scotty79 4mo agoAre you still reading webpages personally instead telling your AI to do it?
- prymitive 4mo agoMaybe your agent could have a little blog where it keeps a diary of cool pages it read for you? And then you subscribe to that?
- scotty79 4mo agoInteresting idea ... doesn't fit my style of content consumption, but it might fit yours. I went for a personal newsfeed, agent pulls news form ~100 feeds related to my interests. Then reads all articles for me and orders them by how interesting they might be for me. I specifically asked for vector embeddings, up/down votes (-2..+2), visited status, LLM content evaluation. Probably there are some other mechanisms I didn't even bother to check. It's a work in progress but I can see myself replacing most of my news reading with it. For many news the AI summary, which contains main idea behind the item is enough for me. As a bonus it resolves clickbait and is quite good at it. Also no ads, ever. For sure I need to implement some grouping because when the popular story breaks I have many stories about the same thing with mostly overlapping details. AI merging them would be quite cool. I also asked AI to extract my interests from my browsing/watching histories of my all accounts. V2 of my newsfeed might utilize that somehow for better results. Silly thing is I made it in one afternoon with my only motivation of being slightly more annoyed with the web on that day.
- mannanj 4mo agoParticular model or LLM that you use?
- scotty79 4mo agoLocal ones (through ollama, probably will use something more performant when I move fully to it). When I touched it the last time I was a fan of gemma4 https://ollama.com/library/gemma4 https://ollama.com/library/gemma4 Since then I grew really fond of Qwen3.6 (it's super capable in coding against the DOM) so I'll probably try to move to it with the next iteration. https://ollama.com/library/qwen3.6 https://ollama.com/library/qwen3.6
- whh 4mo agoI’d love a chrome extension to measure just how many times per day I’m met with the Turnstile. Turnstiles per minute.
- jeroenhd 4mo agoIf all bots are subject to a rate limit, then the system works as designed. Especially if site operators can block bot accounts. Requiring accounts is one of the easiest solutions for that problem. One of the large issues with scrapers is that they pretend to be normal internet visitors that never visited your site before, because any bot that stored cookies would immediately be rate limited by basic config. Turnstile isn't something Cloudflare put up to annoy you. It's what the website owners decided to put up, for many different reasons. In the same vein, Anubis has a default configuration that lets honest scrapers and crawlers through, because those can easily be rejected by basic web server configurations. Only scrapers pretending to be browsers need to solve the proof-of-work puzzle. You can disable that feature, of course. Cloudflare may play this smart: force bots to pay for access, then take 30% of the cut and give the rest to the website owners. That way, websites get paid when the AI slop machine digests their content. Normal visitors get in for free, turn the scraper hellscape into a sustainable model. Bonus points for letting websites set their own rates (pre-declared to scrapers, of course) to dissuade all but the most interested scrapers.
- ascorbic 4mo ago> Cloudflare may play this smart: force bots to pay for access https://developers.cloudflare.com/agents/tools/payments/ https://developers.cloudflare.com/agents/tools/payments/
- Hackbraten 4mo ago> Normal visitors get in for free Except for the unfortunate minority of normal visitors who always get misclassified as bots and get denied access regularly. I wouldn’t be complaining if Cloudflare’s misclassifier bit any user with the same small probability. But it keeps biting the same users over and over again.
- jeroenhd 4mo agoIt'll bite any user that the bots will copy. Every trick a user might use to make themselves unrecognisable on the web is also used by a bot farm somewhere out there. Website owners that use Turnstile and other such services choose to exclude these users. A tiny margin of false positives isn't going to dissuade most website owners, I imagine only the ones that themselves have issues with Cloudflare will bother to add the necessary rules to permit uncommon users (and the bots that copy them).
- xnx 4mo agoBots are very close to being able to pass any captcha a human can. We're very close to most sites requiring a login.