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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

It is a lot less annoying than cookie banners.

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.

I find it very annoying.

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.

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.

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%.