Bonus question: what is cloudflare's role in either enabling or preventing the ddos attacks that one requires cloudflare to survive?

Do they enable any? I don't recall hearing about that.

They protect a large amount of the DDoS-as-a-service sites ("stress testers" or "booters").

That is kinda a BS statement, there are hundreds of thousands of web hosts out there in some form. I am not sure where he is getting such a BS statement.

From the linked post:

> The size and scale of the attacks that can now easily be launched online make it such that if you don't have a network like Cloudflare in front of your content, and you upset anyone, you will be knocked offline. In fact, in the case of the Daily Stormer, the initial requests we received to terminate their service came from hackers who literally said: "Get out of the way so we can DDoS this site off the Internet."

As far as I know, he's right. It's basically only Cloudflare, Google, and a handful of other megacorps that can keep your content online if someone's willing to pay a vigilante with a botnet to get rid of it.

I don't think that's true. Cloudflare is just the most visible option at the moment, and probably (one of) the most cost effective.

His point is that with the amount of DDoS power available out there to various parties, without a major ISP or CDN hosting your content you can trivially be booted off the internet. Once you accept that as a given, if one of the major ISP or CDN networks won't host your content, then you're open to censorship from anyone who doesn't like your message, which if your controversial enough that the ISPs and CDNs won't host you it's probably a given that someone is going to want to DDoS you out of existence. To further complicate things, most small ISPs when faced with a substantial and prolonged DDoS of one of the clients, will terminate that client in order to preserve service to their other clients, which means once again if you aren't being fronted by a major ISP or CDN will likely mean you'll be hoping from ISP to ISP until eventually nobody will be willing to host your content.

I think the point is, if you make a site forgo any sort of DDOS protection it effectively does not exist, especially if DDOSers want to take your site offline. Some website running on a VPS on a small hosting company likely won't be able to have the resources to keep their site running... which in my opinion is fine. If people want to shout you down in public because they don't want others to hear what you have to say, well then find somewhere else to express your views.

And yet, everyone trying to work against this gets immediately downvoted on HN, because everyone considers the work of these companies just so convenient.

It’s classical short-term vs. long-term thinking, and it’s damaging not just to privacy, but also to the startup economy as a whole.

To me it seems like decentralization is actually very popular on HN.

As long as it's written in Go, Rust or formerly Haskell

In fairness your particular example isn't necessarily a good one. Snapchat is a trivial idea and it's frankly amazing it got as far as it did.

Imho his example illustrates his well. Snapchat was fairly disruptive and lost a lot of value when facebook just ripped it off. If we allow giant companies to engage in anti-competitive practices it will hurt us in the long run as people won't even try to innovate. The snapchat story is pretty demotivating. Why bother when one of the largest 5-6 companies in your space will just shut you down or steal your ideas?

My point is that Snapchat isn't a good example of a company pushed out by anti-competitive practices. Their core product is technically trivial and uninteresting. The fact that there is a market demand for it and being first to do it at large scale doesn't in my mind meet any minimal standard for protection from anti-competitive practices as you imply.

If you had something that would disrupt it would :)

I'm really confused, have all the grown-ups returned to HN? Suddenly after several years of self-congratulatory virtue-signalling, HN realizes that self-righteousness censorship is not risk-free, and has long-term consequences? I'm glad I started coming back to HN. Maybe the long recess from reason is over.

We are going to have to have regulation to reign in these companies.

FB, GOOG, MSFT, etc all serve billions of people. FB's network has a 1 people more than china.

The pro-censorship crowd wants to distract with "government vs private company" argument but that really doesn't fly when these companies are larger, wealthier and more powerful than a handful of countries.

FB censorship would affect more people than the communist chinese censoring content in china. That is extremely dangerous.