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Comment by johnklos | Hacker News Reader

The article neatly ignores the reality that Cloudflare is a shitty company that wants to lock everyone possible in as much as possible, that wants to re-centralize the Internet, that wants to become a monopoly.

For every product or service they create, ask yourself this: if taken to the logical conclusion where a majority of people use Cloudflare, do their products help the world, or do their products help them? Do they help the world to their detriment, or do they help Cloudflare to the detriment of the world?

Anyone except fanbois will realize that re-centralization will only hurt the world and will only help Cloudflare, no matter which service or product it is.

They're a shitty company with shitty, dishonest, disingenuous people who spout bullshit and make money off of scammers and spammers. I don't think that's going to change any time soon.

I, for one, am tired of seeing constant Cloudflare propaganda and masturbation on this site.

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Amazon and Google own about half of the market. To criticize Cloudflare for re-centralization would require that we are decentralized in the first place.

Personally, my experience with Cloudflare's edge products so far has been amazing. I've had a free CDN with free SSL certs on every website I've made for the last 5 years. When I started using Workers I hit a mildly troublesome scenario so I opened a PR and they quickly thanked me and merged it. The usage limits for only $5/mo are genuinely unparalleled; they have by far the lowest and most transparent pricing of any similar service, at least for my use cases.

Delivering sites faster to users seems to help the world.

Reducing bandwidth costs and increase site speed seems to be helpful for their direct customers.

Your conclusion only seems to follow if you firmly believe that (internet) centralization is always bad. That's a nuanced topic, but by no means does everyone agree with it.

(Also, your last 3 sentences are very ranty and don't add to the conversation - are you doing ok today?)

Seriously? So the idea that they provide some good outweighs their history of shitty behavior and their desire to re-centralize and become a monopoly?

If what I wrote seems ranty, it might be because you haven't heard of their shitty behavior. Here's something I wrote, but I'm certainly not alone in not being happy with what Cloudflare tries to do:

https://www.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/comments/ldvzih/do_you_k...

My point was to inject some nuance so we could discuss the tradeoffs, rather than your one-sided comment that is a conversation ender. At no point did I attempt to balance the scales to reduce the situation to a good/bad emotional response. It appears that is your objective, which isn't a very interesting way to spend time. Have a nice day.

You say, "but they do good things". I write back with a link to a list of evil things they've done and are doing, and you don't address that one tiny bit.

So you want to say they're wonderful, but can't talk about what they're doing wrong. I want to say they're horrible, and at least I've provided content.

Introducing nuance? Sure... More like another example of pro-Cloudflare fanboism.

I use to be one of those fanboys until I used their product.

They have quite a few dodgy subscription traps and a firm "no-refund under any circumstances" policy even when mistakes were on their end.

I have constantly had to initiate chargebacks in order to do business with them and can't switch since in our case have no competitors.

Boycotting centralized stuff because it's more efficient isn't going to work, so if you want to avoid the Cloudflarepocalypse you need to work on making decentralized systems competitive.

Yeah, but it's still a rather awesome product offering. I wish the US government would put as much effort into mass transit as they have with project Cloudflare.

Do you have an alternative to Cloudflare if they are that bad?

How about NOT Cloudflare? You ask as if they provide services that can't be found elsewhere.

I mean they kind of do at-least for free? What is your alternative so linking to a site from this site doesn't crash it without spending a good bit more money than needed every month?

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