Tech is full of ironies. 5 years ago cloudflare was held as the savior of internet. People in HN and tech in general put them on pedestal. 1.1.1.1, generous ddos protection, cdn, adn to name a few.
Fastforward to today, they being hated foe bringing down the internet, compared to failing giants.
I think it is a reminder that evil and good recides within oneself.
Some parallels to gmail, which similarly rose to dominance by offering a free tier that was leagues above what everyone else was offering. They were also hailed as the savior, followed by a period of disillusionment. Now plenty of competitors have caught up with almost-as-good free offerings, but the world is still much more centralized than it was before
I have no comment on Cloudflare being evil, but if you actually try to use their hosting products which come with a generous free tier, you realize how bad the DX is:
- Their dashboard is next to GCP in terms of how bad it is.
- They ship like three different CLIs that'll often have overlapping functionality: wrangler, c3, cloudflared and flarectl. It feels like an organizationally confused tooling strategy dumped on the user.
- Docs are often out of date
They really need to learn a thing or two from Vercel on the DX
> I think it is a reminder that evil and good recides within oneself.
It's more like "organizations that attain monopoly position find themselves in a bubble that becomes disconnected from reality, regardless of the quality of their intentions".
Most recent example is Google. Cloudflare next, probably.
HN changed, is what happened. The tech startup crowd has sadly migrated to Twitter, and I guarantee you they still love Cloudflare.
HN has become a forum where old school enthusiasts complain loudly about modern tech while refusing to examine the fact that they’re doing it on a forum that’s inherently built to stimulate the very capitalism they decry.
your comment actually made me think about this, cloudflare hasn't actually turned full monopolist... yet, their generous free tier has led to monopoly like market share but the pain society feels is when they go down, they haven't turned the screw to make monopoly (or hyperscaler) profits
They and Prince may never go that way, as someone who occasionally picked SaaS/infra stocks, the ratio of their market share/customers metrics to revenues/profit vs other peers was always on the low side (haven't look at their numbers in a while tho)