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Comment by NoMoreNicksLeft | Hacker News Reader

The age of internet search is over. The age of Cloudflare has begun. It wouldn't be possible to build a search engine now if they wanted to... and there wouldn't be anything to search for anyway. The non-corporate internet withered into dust and blew away in the wind.

If you could find what you want, how would they ever sell you what they want you to buy? And I'm not just talking merchandise, though that too. Your political narratives, your values, opinions, everything. And everyone likes it so much they just sit there scrolling and swiping and tapping.

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I'm hoping for a future where we create static HTML pages again styled with a bit of handmade CSS, because we're so tired of bot attacks and long loading times. Then suddenly a Cloudflare network becomes absolet.

people have been putting their fuckass blogs with 0.5 visitors a day behind Cloudflare long before the increase in bot traffic. and that increase makes fuck all any difference for them anyway.

Cloudflare is quite easy to bypass.

Do you have a source for this claim? Cloudflare gives me endless captchas on almost any website.

Yes, I bought a cheap residential proxy service and used it to scrape a site.

Ironic that I'd need something like that to stop getting blocked from a residential IP

It's probably cheaper to switch your ISP to one that your target site does not block, than to pay someone else to buy that connection and proxy all your traffic through them.

Sorry, I don't consider that a bypass, or easy.

Using a real browser is also easy.

I have tried many, many, many browsers across multiple OSes and different hardware, and they all give me endless captchas.

Firefox, Waterfox, Iceweasel, Icecat, Seamonkey, LibreWolf, Pale Moon, Mullvad, Tor Browser

Chromium, ungoogled-chromium, Google Chrome, Edge, Brave, Falkon, qutebrowser

Safari, GNOME Web, Konqueror

No difference.

I am 100% certain it has nothing to do with my browser.

I think curated directories from prehistory might make a comeback eventually, maybe combined with a search engine that indexes only the whitelisted websites. ironically, we can use LLMs to filter out AI slop by measuring the signal-to-noise ratio, which is atrocious for AI slop and ESL slop that preceded it.

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