Cloudflare took down our website after trying to force us to pay 120k$ within 24h
robindev.substack.com
TL;DR: We've been on the Cloudflare Business plan ($250/month) for years. They suddenly contacted us and asked us to either pay them $120k up front for one year of Enterprise within 24 hours or they would take down all of our domains. While this escalated up our business we had 3 sales calls with them, trying to figure out what was happening and how to reach a reasonable contract in a week. When we told them we were also in talks with Fastly, they suddenly "purged" all our domains, causing huge downtime in our core business, sleepless nights migrating away from CF, irreparable loss in customer trust and weeks of ongoing downtime in our internal systems.

Also, interesting comment I found on HackerNews (HN):

This post was definitely demoted by HN. It stayed in the first position for less than 5 minutes and, as it quickly gathered upvotes, it jumped straight into 24th and quickly fell off the first page as it got 200 or so more points in less than an hour.

I’m 80% confident HN tried to hide this link. It’s the fastest downhill I’ve noticed on here, and I’ve been lurking and commenting for longer than 10 years.

    • @[email protected]English
      7•6 months ago

      Hackernews, unironically named to appeal tech circles, but run by venture capital fund y-combinator, mainly to promote companies they invest in.

      As such it’s mostly used by techbros (MBA types) and tech companies to show-off, start drama, push their PR, damage control, and occasionally post news.

      It’s like linkedin, in reddit format. It’s all about your connections.

      • @[email protected]English
        38•6 months ago

        It’s incredibly selective about which topics it’s good for. Want insight into advanced mathematics or new programming languages and people there have amazing insight. But they bring the same level of confidence to the discussion when talking about topics they’ve no idea about.

        • @[email protected]English
          6•6 months ago

          It’s the Pravda of the VC-centric tech scene and has been for a very very long time.

          (I am referencing the Soviet Union implementation thereof, for clarity)

          It’s never going to bite the hand that feeds it, where people will voting-ring or the owners will just force-edit it to prevent that from happening. Outside of that, sometimes it might say something useful. The problem is that today’s problems are not because of a lack of advanced mathematics understanding or new programming languages.

          • Dr. DabblesEnglish
            2•6 months ago

            It’s the Pravda of the VC-centric tech scene and has been for a very very long time.

            At least someone else gets it.

          • Alphane MoonEnglish
            1•6 months ago

            It’s the Pravda of the VC-centric tech scene and has been for a very very long time.

            A very interesting description. I only occasionally read HN via links from other sources, but I wouldn’t be surprised if there is a lot of truth to your characterization.

        • moxEnglish
          5•6 months ago

          they bring the same level of confidence to the discussion when talking about topics they’ve no idea about.

          Generally, I’ve found the discussion quality across these sites to be something like this:

          HN > Lemmy > Reddit > 4chan

          But yes, I have seen examples of incorrect confidence and bad-faith arguments on all of them. I don’t think it can be escaped in a public forum of humans. :)

        • Dr. DabblesEnglish
          1•6 months ago

          I’d suggest they’re just as wrong about programming languages and maths as any other topic.