Hacker News Reader

Comment by vickychijwani | Hacker News Reader

An “orange cloud” with no other indication to represent a feature that is enabled-by-default (with implicitly enabled analytics) sounds like quite the dark pattern. The UI makes the DNS record seem to point to A (your entry) but actually points to B (Cloudflare). This isn’t an oversight, it’s an attempt to obfuscate.

Even if the choice to enable it by default makes sense for Cloudflare’s userbase, the implications are hidden and non-obvious.

View on HN

It's essentially the entire reason to use Cloudflare.

As sibling mentions it is indeed labeled and not just some icon. People just refer to the orange cloud UI for it for convenience and because it makes it easy to spot whether you have it on or not.

But regarding the icon, the icon is their company logo, it really is the primary feature. It's also not like you have to go find it in settings to turn it off after adding DNS record, it's part of the form when you add the record (default on, yes), and it's prominent when viewing the record.

I don't buy that, there is no reason for 99.9999% of sites to use cloudflare.

The "reason" to use cloudflare is hype.

It's the reason for its existence and the reason people are choosing it. If they are making a mistake, hoodwinked by hype, that's totally unrelated to the point being discussed. I think you've just seized the opportunity to post your disdain for them without regard to the actual topic being discussed.

Truly doubt that. Sure, but if they are making a mistake due to dark patterns then it is another thing.

This thread does indicate the latter.

You don't think there's value in hiding origin ip from hackers? lol.

If you are self-hosting, sure. Otherwise, mostly no.

The options are actually labelled as 'Proxied' or 'DNS Only', so that is actually quite clear.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com