Web 1.0 sites load so fast.
this post was submitted on 11 Feb 2026
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My production servers would fall over due to the sheer amount of bot swarms and AI crawlers if we didn’t have Cloudflare’s WAF protecting it. And, it’s free.
cloudfare does nothing but make problems
Sometimes I miss the old Captchas.
Iirc these were often used to train algorithms to read scanned text. Give one scanned word, and a generated gibberish word. If the gibberish one matches, weight the scanned word closer towards understood. Check consensus on that scanned word for a bunch of users, and you’ve now confirmed the scanned word is “arch.”
You are living the consequences of what happens when a market is no longer a free market (where companies compete on merit) and instead an oligopoly, where companies extract all the value for themselves at the expense of everyone else. Now bow to your tech overlords, peasant.
The market has never once been free. A free market is a capitalist myth, either a higher authority gets involved to break up things such as monopolies or the companies collude together. Neither is “free”, capitalism is a failure of a ideology that has doomed our species and most others.
Cloudflare has had major outages, and I suspect it's cost more time and inconvenience than it's saved. It was created to prevent DDOS attacks, which aren't widely used any more and public facing front desk webpages shouldn't really be concerned with anyways.