The web does not need gatekeepers: Cloudflare’s new “signed agents” pitch

Allowlist is arguably fitting for a list of things which are allowed.

It's called a whitelist. A perfectly good word that isn't racist and one that normal people are quite happy to use. As far as I can tell the allow/blocklist craze hasn't made it out of the software world.

Both whitelist and allowlist are equally normal and good.

It's weird that people will claim that "politics" have no place in software while insisting that there is one and only one term "normal" people should use because the politics of the people who object to it are bad and wrong.

> Both whitelist and allowlist are equally normal and good.

Good is debatable, but normal?? No, obviously not. One is a word that has been around for over a hundred years and is understood by everyone that speaks English; the other is like 4 years old and only used by some software nerds. 90% of normal people would not know what it means.

90% of normal people have never heard of a whitelist either, but any English speaker could intuit what "allowlist" means more easily that "whitelist" without context. And both are technical terms of art in the context of this conversation, so what 90% of normal people would or wouldn't understand isn't even relevant.

And "enshittification" is even newer than "allowlist" and it's practically mainstream.