Getting hit with "Prove you are a human" at every other website
I click on websites posted here to read the articles and every other one of them requires me to solve some fking puzzle or click on a checkbox or some other bullshit. With cloudflare acting like a bouncer at almost 50-60% of the pages and the weird anime girl on 10-20% of the pages doing some fuck all calculations on my browser and google capctha requiring me to play the damn select crosswalks which is impossible to get correct in tbe first try. I am tired and sick of it. I dont even bother anymore I close the browser page and move on nowadays. Or just come back read the comments on hn for that article. I cannot even read an article in peace without these pesky bouncers at every other website. I'm tired boss. Do you folks feel the same or am I over reacting.
Look, I want to see WCAG adopt "Any ad that covers content, a cookie banner, or Anubis or Cloudflare harassment is an immediate F grade" I'm a little more hopeful than that than to get a requirement like "you should actually have a disabled person test it"
What the people who like Anubis don't get is that the cost for honest people is very real, the cost for crawlers is basically $0 because: most of the people who run crawlers are just idiots and aren't paying attention to what's happening and get crap data and don't even know they are getting bounced and probably don't even look at the crap data they collect, the worst of the crawlers are running botnets using stolen CPU, the real AI companies don't have any financial discipline and wouldn't care it if anubis wasted a CPU*hour per page.
Or rather, those "click on the bus" images raise your blood pressure but are close to trivial for a bot to automate... It's all performative... We're good open source people who prove we are good open source people because we put Anubis on our page to shame those bad AI people.
Yes, I feel like there has been a sharp uptick in this the past couple months.
Whatever magic is built into the CloudFlare checkbox and my motion to click on it, I really wish was just part of the browser and my motion to click on everything else.
It's even worse when you are traveling cause then you run into country-blocks on websites and videos on top of all of that, and you didn't even mention the forced logging-in or registration walls to continue browsing/shopping/etc!
Feels like the whole internet is hitting that hockey stick growth... towards becoming shit.
Once you get past that, it's on to the auth walls where you have to login every day or week. We have perfect the nagging modals to suit all anti-consumer patterns.
This is the internet in 2026 and it sure as hell won't get any better.
Kinda disappointing that this doesn't get daily attention on HN of all places.
I have two Firefox extensions that solve captchas for me. They are just eye exams and most unwelcome.
Buster: Captcha Solver for Humans [0]
NopeCHA: CAPTCHA Solver [1]
OF COURSE, these are band-aids on an internet under full assault.
P.S. Paywall busters are a nuisance to run through. Often, a paywalled article is syndicated (MSN does this a lot) or available at arxiv, or an author's institution, so "Use the web search, Luke."
What the people who like Anubis don't get is that the cost for honest people is very real, the cost for crawlers is basically $0 because: most of the people who run crawlers are just idiots and aren't paying attention to what's happening and get crap data and don't even know they are getting bounced and probably don't even look at the crap data they collect, the worst of the crawlers are running botnets using stolen CPU, the real AI companies don't have any financial discipline and wouldn't care it if anubis wasted a CPU*hour per page.
Or rather, those "click on the bus" images raise your blood pressure but are close to trivial for a bot to automate... It's all performative... We're good open source people who prove we are good open source people because we put Anubis on our page to shame those bad AI people.
Whatever magic is built into the CloudFlare checkbox and my motion to click on it, I really wish was just part of the browser and my motion to click on everything else.
Feels like the whole internet is hitting that hockey stick growth... towards becoming shit.
This is the internet in 2026 and it sure as hell won't get any better.
Kinda disappointing that this doesn't get daily attention on HN of all places.
Buster: Captcha Solver for Humans [0]
NopeCHA: CAPTCHA Solver [1]
OF COURSE, these are band-aids on an internet under full assault.
P.S. Paywall busters are a nuisance to run through. Often, a paywalled article is syndicated (MSN does this a lot) or available at arxiv, or an author's institution, so "Use the web search, Luke."
[0] https://github.com/dessant/buster
[1] https://nopecha.com/