One odd thing with cloudflare is most sites are fine, and I click the box, but for some reason I go to some sites and they claim I have been blocked for bot like activity, which seems weird since it should be the same filter from the same provider.
Do you have any other extensions installed or use a VPN? This is highly abnormal compared to most users’ experience but not uncommon if you’re using an IP range which is also a source of malicious traffic.
The underlying problem is that “everyone assumes you are a bot” because every site operator has seen a huge increase in bot activity over the last few years. The AI companies ignore previously industry norms about traffic and do things like use residential IP ranges to originate their traffic (one way “free” VPNs and certain browser extensions make money), which means the amount of traffic most sites see has considerably more than doubled while bringing in no more revenue, and abusive activity is way up, too, because it’s cheap to point LLMs at forms to spam or try to exploit vulnerabilities.
This is fine. Not sure how that’s related to the rest of your post.
But for the rest of your post I agree with what you wrote. If a website is even vaguely annoying I just stop visiting. It seems like product managers forgot that friction is an issue. I can’t even access my ISP’s own website and get blocked by Cloudflare.
But there is Gemini (the real Gemini not the stolen name google uses) and gopher. There are decent content there plus news sites. You just need to look, similar to what we did in the 90s.
You can use dillo w/plugins for Gemini/Gopher or Lynx for Gopher or lagrange/amfora for Gemini or Emacs Elpher for Gemini and Gopher. Also deedum on Cell Phones.
Some links:
gopher://magical.fish/
gopher://gopher.floodgap.com:70
gopher://sdf.org/1/
https://sdf.org/?tutorials/gopher
gemini://gemi.dev/
gemini://gem.sdf.org/
gemini://sdf.org/
gemini://gemini.circumlunar.space/capcom/
Forgot to mention, USENET is still around and now that Google disconnected google groups from USENET, spam has decreased a lot.
Shake off all these brands and overly confident predators everywhere.
I’d love a reset. Better if there’s a technical step to keep mainstream out.
No, the Internet is not that broken; you just have to leave the Top 10 sites