[acdha]

We do know, just ask anyone who runs a more popular site or does anything where abuse can be monetized (shopping, reviews, etc.). Avoiding that due to obscurity isn’t an answer because it’s saying you’re safe until something, possibly outside of your control, causes the bots to descend and give you an extra 500M requests with no chance of revenue.

I’m with OP: I don’t like this but the alternatives all look like the death of the open web.

[handoflixue]

> just ask anyone who runs a more popular site

The person you're responding to already said they ran a modestly sized site. What actual scale opens one up to abuse? If only the top 1% of sites need it, then it seems silly to say "everyone" needs it.

[ceejayoz]

It’s not just scale. Do you accept user generated content? If so, more of a target.

[wizzwizz4]

Stack Overflow was outside of the Cloudflare network for years, and anti-abuse was maybe 3 or 4 full-time jobs – much of which still needs to be done, because Cloudflare's anti-bot protection hasn't actually stopped it. Most UGC sites are not as big as Stack Overflow was at its peak.

[ceejayoz]

Most UGC sites also don't have a horde of volunteer mods voting to close/delete things.

[wizzwizz4]

I'm referring specifically to the activities of Charcoal (https://charcoal-se.org/) and their Stack Exchange staff counterparts, taken together. This is about large-scale platform abuse, of the sort that Cloudflare is alleged to prevent (but doesn't, really), not the more mundane (and laborious) task of manual quality control.

[black_puppydog]

errr... so anything related to UGC now has a lower bound of 3-4 FTE? Sure, I'll hire a team of content moderators next time I think about putting a comment form under my blog...

[Dylan16807]

Please read their last sentence again and think about how much it understates the difference between stack overflow in its prime and a normal website. Also the "much of which still needs to be done".

[GoblinSlayer]

Yes? Cloudflare doesn't replace moderators. At all. It only allegedly filters bot generated content, it doesn't filter user generated content and doesn't even intend to.

[daishi55]

So everyone is paying cloudflare… why?

[tardedmeme]

Because paying with MITM is far less visible than paying with money

[fragmede]

Most likely not. Their free tier is fairly generous.

[LgWoodenBadger]

Because charging for bandwidth/traffic is still a thing, unfortunately