Ethics-free organizations and individuals like Perplexity are why Cloudflare exists. If you have a better way to solve the problems that they solve, the marketplace would reward you handsomely.
Do you think users shouldn't get to have user agents or that "content farm ads scaffold" as a business model has a right to be viable? Forcing users to reward either stance seems unsustainable.
> Do you think users shouldn't get to have user agents or that "content farm ads scaffold" as a business model has a right to be viable?
Users should get to have authenticated, anonymous proxy user agents. Because companies like Perplexity just ignore `robots.txt`, maybe something like Private Access Tokens (PATs) with a new class for autonomous agents could be a solution for this.
By "content farm ads scaffold", I'm not sure if you had Perplexity and their ads business in mind, or those crappy little single-serving garbage sites. In any case, they shouldn't be treated differently. I have no problem with the business model, other than that the scam only works because it's currently trivial to parasitically strip-mine and monetize other people's IP.
While the existence of Perplexity may justify the existence of Cloudflare, it does not justify the incompetence of Cloudflare, which is unable to distinguish accesses done by Perplexity and the like from normal accesses done by humans, who use those sites exactly for the purpose they exist, so there cannot be any excuse for the failure of Cloudflare to recognize this.
