Honestly, I would normally not bat an eye at the decision to flag this snarky, but I'm astonished how many blatantly wrong comments there are. Maybe it's just Gell-mann amnesia at work...
It wasn't flagged. decremental is shadowbanned, look at their comment history it's all [dead], not [flagged][dead]. If you don't see [flagged] before a [dead] comment or submission, then it was done either actively by a moderator (rare) or as part of automatic moderation.
When you say "this", do you mean sycophant-seeking authoritarian leaders demanding the appearance of commitments with fake numbers? Like when our president demanded a foreign leader "look like" he was investigating the presumptive Democratic nominee in 2019? Or when our president demanded certain numbers be made up in the state of Georgia for him to win an election?
I can't tell what you think "both sides" are doing.
It's not that website owners don't care that they're frustrating users, losing visitors and customers, or creating a poor experience. It's an intractable problem for most website owners to combat the endless ways that their sites are being botted and bogged down, and having to pay for resources to handle the 98% of traffic their sites are getting that isn't coming from real users and customers. By all means, solve it and everyone will be happy.
Heh. Who asked those website owners to have laggy scrolling, non existent contrast, hijack my back button, generally run so much javascript that a cluster is needed client side just to display a 3 line LLM generated blog post?
To be fair, the sites resorting to extreme anti-bot measures are also often not the ones that are a clientside JavaScript hell.
Thinking of the most extreme option (throwing proof of work checks at browsers), the main stuff that jumps to mind is sites like sourcehut, Linux Kernel Archives and so on and the admins for all of those sites have noted that the traffic they get is far outside of expectations[0]. Not whatever blogspam ended up on the top of Google search that day.
The badly designed sites are often the ones that don't care about their bandwidth anyways.
This. It seems every website these days needs Javascript enabled just to load static content that could have been loaded between the time I hovered over a link and clicked it.
You're painting with a pretty damn broad brush there.
Do you think that every small personal website is serving nothing but "a 3 line LLM generated blog post"? Do you not think there are some out there that have perfectly reasonable content? Much of it not even monetized?
And yet the bots are causing this problem for everyone. They are completely indiscriminate.
So before you try to dismiss this as a non-issue, maybe consider that there's more out there being affected by this than the absolute worst case possible to imagine.
From the telegraph.co.uk: "Elite police unit to monitor online critics of migrants" and there are people worried about the "political climate" in the US lmao
The UK in the last 2 decades has been far more totalitarian than the US, even up to 2025. But the people in England seem to accept it and openly defend government encroachment even here on HN. While even smallest steps towards eroding rights in US have people there decry it, so it's far more controversial and newsworthy
But it's nice so many people care about the last few places where hard freedoms exist. The biggest risk is missing the forest for the trees and not seeing the local extensions of short term political comprise.
You say that as if it stands as truth on its own. We actually don't need to filter out how people actually talk and think. Otherwise you just end up with yet another enforcer against wrong-think. I wonder if you even think that deeply about it or if you're just wired at this point to conform.
I guarantee that you cannot imagine the course of American history if every foreign national was vetted for dissident works. Losing WWII would have only been the tip of the iceberg.
HN skews heavily towards users with very unusual setups. Using one of the least popular browsers on an OS almost no one in the grand scheme of things uses makes you a statistical outlier on its own. Who knows what other obscure configuration choices could be making the problem even worse for such a user?
But yeah, it's none of that just Cloudflare hates brown people or something.
