Comment on Perplexity AI is complaining their plagiarism bot machine cannot bypass Cloudflare's firewall
jqubed@lemmy.world 14 hours agoI think in Cloudflare’s case the free tier website owners are more an example of just giving the users a limited product in hopes of enticing them to upgrade to the paid product with more features and better performance. Cloudflare might get some benefit in the ability to track end-users across more websites as part of their efforts to determine who is a real human versus a potentially-malicious bot, but I don’t think that really gives the same ROI like Facebook or other services extract from their “free” services where the users are the actual product.
Cloudflare might get some benefit in the ability to track end-users across more websites as part of their efforts to determine who is a real human versus a potentially-malicious bot
It lets them get a very wide base to test products against, which in and of itself, is a huge benefit. They can test out far more edge-cases than anyone else in the industry at the moment.
It’s a spectrum and Cloudflare has snuffed out or gobbled up quite everyone they need to before the end the honeymoon phase.
_cryptagion@anarchist.nexus 10 hours ago
Actually, they've said that their free tier is what gives them a paid tier to sell to other people. They know most people aren't going to buy anything from them, but the are fine with that because they get to collect a ton of data about who is using hundreds of thousands of websites in order to figure out what traffic is bad. Without that huge user base, they can't do what they do.
And judging from the article, it's working out for them.