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I've found Google's RE-Captcha or whatever they are calling it now so frustrating lately. First off, it always seems to be about cars and roads, and it seems pr
by mtgx 9y ago
I've found Google's RE-Captcha or whatever they are calling it now so frustrating lately. First off, it always seems to be about cars and roads, and it seems pretty obvious they're using this to help their self-driving car technology program. I don't know why but this rubs me the wrong way. It makes me feel like I'm being used to do free work for Google - like a digital miner of sorts.
Second, it doesn't work that well, as in it tells me that I was wrong when I should have been right, and it keeps throwing images at me, making the logging experience quite frustrating. This especially seems to happen around signs, like when you miss a part of a sign's pole or something. Although other times it seems to act the opposite way, and it only wants the middle larger sections. That uncertainty about what you're even supposed to do exactly makes for a bad experience.
The part where it continuously changes the images on you is even more annoying, because you're left there wondering "Do I have to pick many more of these?! Because I almost want to give-up trying to login."
Whatever they did to "improve it", like a year ago or maybe a little less than that, seems broken to me.
- j_s 9y agoI'm being used to do free work for Google Does Google do [edit - adding quotes:] "free" work for you? Not sure how anyone dependent on Google's services (not you specifically necessarily, but most in general) such as search or mail could justify this perspective.
- simias 9y agoThat's a non sequitur. If you only had to fill captchas to access google services you'd have a point, but plenty of 3rd party websites completely unrelated to Google use them nowadays. I also much preferred the older text-based captchas (which google also "abused" to OCR text IIRC), I found them easier and quicker to solve and I didn't have to reach for the mouse. Fortunately 4chan at least lets you switch back to "legacy captcha".
- j_s 9y agoIf you only had to fill captchas to access google services you'd have a point No, in that case Google is providing the service to plenty of 3rd party websites completely unrelated to Google, who basically punt and wind up saying "do this work for Google for access".
- simias 9y agoRight, I'm not saying whether that's a good or a bad thing, I'm just pointing out that it doesn't make sense to say that it's fine to do "free work" for Google because they also provide other services for free. Those two things are mostly unrelated. If you use gmail but never solve captchas are you freeloading? What if I use adblock but I solve a lot of captchas, am I good? If I pay for Google's business "G suite" do I no longer have to solve captchas? If I don't use gmail or google search can I opt out of captchas?
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- j_s 9y agosay that it's fine to do "free work" for Google because they also provide other services for free That's not what I meant; my poorly communicated point was more about how nothing is really "free" (should have included the quotes earlier!).
- vosper 9y agoWell in exchange for my dependence on their services they show me ads, and make rather a lot of money doing it.
- j_s 9y agoin exchange for my dependence on their services they show me ads ... plus ask you to solve captchas sometimes, right? Is there some line or reason where ads are ok but captchas aren't? Edit: With captchas the site benefits directly from Google, but ads function similarly.
- Santosh83 9y agoWell, you can ignore ads, or not click on them, and get on with your work. You can't do that with captchas unless you're willing to be locked out of the page/site.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- j_s 9y agoA less charitable interpretation: letting non-ad-blocking others provide enough value / pay the bills makes ads ok but captchas are not ok because they level the playing field / are required. In theory, no ad revenue will eventually lock out the site too.
- sundvor 9y agoI agree, lately they've become incredibly aggravating - frustrating, slow and tedious. I'm pretty sure it stopped being about proving that you're a real person some time ago too.
- vosper 9y agoI've had the same experience. It seems like a lottery as to whether it'll decide I'm not a robot, or want me to help train their computer vision system. It wouldn't be so bad if it was just a few images and took 2 seconds, like text CAPTCHAs, but yesterday I had one that probably took a full minute to complete, as it just kept showing me more pictures of cars. It was really annoying.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- majewsky 9y agoEven more frustratingly, if you're on a VPN or such, it takes even longer. When at the Chaos Communication Congress (whose uplink goes over a VPN) I gave up after some 3-5 minutes of trying to solve an image classification reCAPTCHA.
- Eridrus 9y agoI wonder if you are somehow far outside the norm in a way that is suspicious to Google, e.g. do you use Tor or VPNs or similar? I'm mostly asking rhetorically, because I haven't needed to do more than click the checkbox saying I am not a robot in months.
- raverbashing 9y agoYes. I suppose if you have ad-blocking/tracking-blocking you get to do more work as well (Google gives me some 2 panes to identify before allowing me through) And yes, it's frustrating. You never know if that tiny corner of a triangle sign counts as "a sign" or not
- coldpie 9y ago> It makes me feel like I'm being used to do free work for Google - like a digital miner of sorts. They are providing you a service--preventing spam bots from abusing services that you want to use--and are using your proof-of-work as payment. I don't see the problem.
- corobo 9y agoThey are providing the website I'm visiting a service, not me. Spambots aren't really my personal issue - the site either sorts it or the userbase goes elsewhere. I don't really mind captchas aside from the new ones that Google's doing, the "Keep clicking roads until there are no roads anymore" ones, just devil's advocate.
- SomeStupidPoint 9y agoThat sounds like they're providing a service for a website, and the website is passing on the bill to you.
- coldpie 9y agoI don't see a meaningful difference between these phrasings.
- ilamont 9y agoI get cars, road signs, storefronts (with signs, often in other languages), and from time to time, mountains. Not sure how the last two fit into the self-driving car hypothesis, unless the program is being extended to other types of self-driving vehicles, such as delivery drones.
- ian0 9y agoWhat frustrates me is the lack of a session tracker. On one login form I may have to sit through the captcha multiple times if Im guessing a password, for example. Unless.. its deliberate, and Im just really good at identifying road signs?