Captchas are for free image recognition training, not verifying humanity. My ability to identify fire hydrants is not what makes me human.
this post was submitted on 10 Jun 2026
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me_irl
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There are additional hidden JS checks on those captchas tho. The fire hydrants is just their way of extracting value, so they can offer them for free to the site owner.
Cloudflare, for example, gets their money another way, so they can skip the fire hydrants.
Captchas are to annoy people using VPN.
!!!!
Two of my apps probably blocked me temporarily for using VPN. It's sorted now but for months I was not able to log in to my shopping app and I have missed out on some deals. My gym membership was also inaccessible for two months.
When captchas were first a thing computers couldn’t do them yet so for a very brief period of time they were effective at filtering robots. I can believe that some poor Google engineer from 2009 or whatever didn’t realize the implication of what they were creating.
Around 2023 when a bunch of Lemmy instances got stood up after the reddit debarcle. Most instances were still open sign up at that point, then the Lemmy devs removed the (basic) captcha from the signup page.
That day we learnt that even the most basic captcha still stops a LOT of bots.
The earliest ones that asked you to type two words were also used to help digitize the Google Books library, for cases when the OCR wasn't quite able to match a word confidently. That's why you'd get a pair, one that was clearer but "jumbled" to be unreadable to computers, the other looked more like a fuzzy scan (or occasionally just a complete mess of misplaced ink), though both had a wavy effect applied to them. Only the clearer one was needed to pass the test, the other was just free training for their OCR process.
Checking if your a bot was just pretense. The real goal is free training.
Google is the sociopathic and parasitic stalker that's the serial mass murderer.
It sucks to be used to train an AI, but I don't want to use an Internet without some kind of human verification for some endpoints.
If you think it sucks trying to buy high demand stuff like concert tickets or new game consoles, imagine if every service was instantly at capacity. Captchas absolutely don't stop all bots, but they are effective at slowing things down to a more human speed.
The worst thing is that Google has a near monopoly on this technology and they are starting to use it offensively to maintain their monopoly in other areas like what they are planning to do with requirements for play services for captchas so folks using custom roms get locked out of sites/apps. We gotta get developers to ditch the Google captcha services and use alternatives.
Well, it doesn’t matter how many times I click every scrap of bicycle or motorcycle, or stairs, or crosswalks, Google still doesn’t think I’m human.
Bloody peasant!