Interesting, thanks

That’s really weird explanation on part of CF CEO, as just after DNS request you usually connect to the site which address you requested and site gets a lot more details including full IP address anyway.

Because if he’s able to help anyone on SO, he very likely profited many, many times from free access to knowledge there before he got to this point. Given activity of average user he probably gained orders of magnitude more than he given.

I find rambling about money and compensation in such context distasteful.

SO provided platform which, while not perfect is used by millions of people. They aren’t overloaded with ads and dark patterns as many of the clones. If it’s worthless, why people are using it instead self hosted blogs for example?

Well guy complains about compensation for his “work”. I assume he’s ready to shell out a few dollars for when he’ll need it :-)

Would you prefer SO to be paid?

In general I strongly prefer open source, because lots of propertiary software will try to vendor lock you and then extract money from you, when it’s hard to escape for you.

In this case however I can change back to Connect or other any second, so amount of control this program has is extremely minimal and experience in exchange is better.

Informed choice is better than picking and following dogma, because dogma doesn’t work in some cases.

That’s easily detectable. Try beating Google Safety Net that way.

“Can” and “have a reason” are different things. With attestation they actually have a reason.