7 ms·

On the flip side, abuse exists, and wishing that anti-abuse measures went away does not acknowledge reality. Just like how I'm annoyed when I have to pay for a

On the flip side, abuse exists, and wishing that anti-abuse measures went away does not acknowledge reality. Just like how I'm annoyed when I have to pay for a cup of coffee, but my annoyance doesn't really inform how things should be. Besides, if a relatively simple puzzle is too much to ask, then maybe you didn't care all that much to begin with. I can think of various platforms where this would be a good filter even if there was no such thing as abuse. ;)

robin_reala 8y ago
The puzzles aren’t simple if you’re blind or hard of vision. Or don’t have a US cultural background (I personally know a sidewalk is US English for a pavement, but I definitely don’t recognise all US street signs or shop hoardings, and have been caught out by that before).
- wild_preference 8y ago
  ReCaptcha, of all things, has pretty good accessibility measures. Likely more than the site in which it's embedded. Nobody is claiming it's perfect. But notice how nobody here is analyzing why people use ReCaptcha in the first place nor providing alternatives. If you knew nothing of ReCaptcha and only read these comments, you'd wonder if it was a gag website operators put on their website for self-amusement, which is basically how I looked at homework as a kid. But I feel like this discussion is a bit more one-sided than I expected on HN, a place where I would've thought more people had experience running a website and how immediately effective ReCaptcha was the second you added a <textarea>.
  - robin_reala 8y ago
    No. They say they do, but neither me not any of the team that tried it was able to complete a single test of the ReCAPTCHA accessible fallbacks. 0%. This was a couple of years ago, but at that point at least putting ReCAPTCHA into a site was putting a fixed roadblock in for people with visual impairments strong enough to force them down their audio route.
    - wild_preference 8y ago
      You're going to lose users or time/money with any abuse prevention. But you lose even more by letting things like spammers run rampant on your platform. You're stuck analyzing trade-offs, not ignoring reality. Once again, all trails lead back to you providing some alternative solutions instead of the empty catharsis of coming up with downsides to something in an internet comment. Here's one of my own: Isn't it annoying that spambots show up the second I launch a website? Ugh! Well, got that out of the way. Now I need a solution. What's yours?
      - esotericn 8y ago
        I don't see reCAPTCHA use being limited to this sort of case at all. On the contrary, many websites use it as an initial gate before I get to see anything.
      - exodust 8y ago
        You sound irritated that people find Recaptcha irritating. It's not about disliking anti-spam measures, it's about highlighting the woeful method that is re-captcha. "Select all squares with street signs" shows a bunch of squares, some of them contain only part of the pole that presumably has a sign attached out of shot. So do you click that square that only has the pole? A pole is not a sign, it's a piece of steel. But it's part of the sign, so are people expected to select it or not? Re-captcha is not a smart system.
        will123195 8y ago
        > A pole is not a sign Guess we can close the file on that one.
        vokep 8y ago
        Not to mention, you're basically providing free mechanical turk style work for google. Back when it started with digitizing books, alright sure thats helping an open initiative to do something good. When I have to click cars and trees and traffic lights in order to post a comment, Google, is having me do work for them, and I'd rather not work for them, even if its only a few seconds at a time here or there.
- RandomInteger4 8y ago
  You realize that when you're doing these CAPTCHAs, you're on the internet right? You could ask Google or DDG, "What is an XYZ?" and they would happily provide examples. Honestly, you're kind of insulting the intelligence of most people without a US cultural background.
  - _emacsomancer_ 8y ago
    Except when Google blocks you from using the search engine until you've answered the CAPTCHA....
    - RandomInteger4 8y ago
      You understand that Google isn't the only search engine ... right?
- Izkata 8y ago
  > The puzzles aren’t simple if you’re blind or hard of vision. Or don’t have a US cultural background I've lived my whole life in the US and have about 20/20 vision (used to be slightly better than 20/15), and I'd estimate my reCaptcha pass rate around 20%. The puzzles are just badly done, it's not even a vision or knowledge thing.
  - ardy42 8y ago
    > The puzzles are just badly done, it's not even a vision or knowledge thing. Yeah. The puzzles are terrible now, and I have a strong suspicion that they're no longer testing to see if you behave like another human, but instead testing you to see if you act like their own machine vision bot.
- nurino 8y ago
  This reminds me of the day I was told to select all taxis... took me some time to understand they meant "yellow cars" (taxis are white here)
  - astura 8y ago
    Ummm... Huh? Taxis are a different color everywhere, there's no "standard," even NYC has green taxis ("Boro Taxis"). Yellow is a popular color, because it stands out, but I've taken taxis every color of the rainbow (well, maybe not pink or purple), each area or company is different. In my neighborhood two companies operate taxis, one has a fleet of red taxis and another has a fleet of blue taxis. From my observation, black is probably the second most common taxi color. You identify a taxi by it's markings, not it's color.
    - beojan 8y ago
      I wouldn't be surprised if users have inadvertently trained the AI behind reCAPTCHA to think all taxis are yellow.
    - nurino 8y ago
      Then it's not US-centrism but NYC-centrism? I mean you tell me to check the markings, but you know in those captchas you can't see any markings because most things look like a blurry blob.
      - astura 8y ago
        Taxis are easy to identify - cars with a (usually lit) topper and writing all over them are taxis, the writing doesn't even have to be in a language you understand to be identifiable as a taxi - you don't need to actually be able to read the writing. Other marks like checkered patterns are common, taxis are designed to stand out. New York City also has green taxis, so it's not anywhere-centric thing.
Bartweiss 8y ago
> a relatively simple puzzle I'm curious where the line on "relatively simple" is. Other people have already noted the tasks can be confusing if you're not an American English-speaker, and that the backup tasks for people with vision difficulties are nigh impossible. But beyond that: some of the time I have to do 1-3 Captcha pages, which I would class as relatively simple. Other times, I've gotten up to 10+ pages with what I believe was perfect accuracy. (They were fairly simple tasks like "click the stoplights", not the sometimes-ambiguous ones like "click the storefronts".) That's usually when I'm traveling, so it's correlated with slow internet. I don't know what the upper limit is, because there are very few pages I care about enough to push through 10+ rounds of Captcha, but I'd argue that "spending 3 minutes studying traffic photos with no end in sight" is way past my definition of 'simple'.

robin_reala 8y ago

The puzzles aren’t simple if you’re blind or hard of vision. Or don’t have a US cultural background (I personally know a sidewalk is US English for a pavement, but I definitely don’t recognise all US street signs or shop hoardings, and have been caught out by that before).

wild_preference 8y ago
ReCaptcha, of all things, has pretty good accessibility measures. Likely more than the site in which it's embedded. Nobody is claiming it's perfect. But notice how nobody here is analyzing why people use ReCaptcha in the first place nor providing alternatives. If you knew nothing of ReCaptcha and only read these comments, you'd wonder if it was a gag website operators put on their website for self-amusement, which is basically how I looked at homework as a kid. But I feel like this discussion is a bit more one-sided than I expected on HN, a place where I would've thought more people had experience running a website and how immediately effective ReCaptcha was the second you added a <textarea>.
- robin_reala 8y ago
  No. They say they do, but neither me not any of the team that tried it was able to complete a single test of the ReCAPTCHA accessible fallbacks. 0%. This was a couple of years ago, but at that point at least putting ReCAPTCHA into a site was putting a fixed roadblock in for people with visual impairments strong enough to force them down their audio route.
  - wild_preference 8y ago
    You're going to lose users or time/money with any abuse prevention. But you lose even more by letting things like spammers run rampant on your platform. You're stuck analyzing trade-offs, not ignoring reality. Once again, all trails lead back to you providing some alternative solutions instead of the empty catharsis of coming up with downsides to something in an internet comment. Here's one of my own: Isn't it annoying that spambots show up the second I launch a website? Ugh! Well, got that out of the way. Now I need a solution. What's yours?
    - esotericn 8y ago
      I don't see reCAPTCHA use being limited to this sort of case at all. On the contrary, many websites use it as an initial gate before I get to see anything.
    - exodust 8y ago
      You sound irritated that people find Recaptcha irritating. It's not about disliking anti-spam measures, it's about highlighting the woeful method that is re-captcha. "Select all squares with street signs" shows a bunch of squares, some of them contain only part of the pole that presumably has a sign attached out of shot. So do you click that square that only has the pole? A pole is not a sign, it's a piece of steel. But it's part of the sign, so are people expected to select it or not? Re-captcha is not a smart system.
      - will123195 8y ago
        > A pole is not a sign Guess we can close the file on that one.
      - vokep 8y ago
        Not to mention, you're basically providing free mechanical turk style work for google. Back when it started with digitizing books, alright sure thats helping an open initiative to do something good. When I have to click cars and trees and traffic lights in order to post a comment, Google, is having me do work for them, and I'd rather not work for them, even if its only a few seconds at a time here or there.
RandomInteger4 8y ago
You realize that when you're doing these CAPTCHAs, you're on the internet right? You could ask Google or DDG, "What is an XYZ?" and they would happily provide examples. Honestly, you're kind of insulting the intelligence of most people without a US cultural background.
- _emacsomancer_ 8y ago
  Except when Google blocks you from using the search engine until you've answered the CAPTCHA....
  - RandomInteger4 8y ago
    You understand that Google isn't the only search engine ... right?
Izkata 8y ago
> The puzzles aren’t simple if you’re blind or hard of vision. Or don’t have a US cultural background I've lived my whole life in the US and have about 20/20 vision (used to be slightly better than 20/15), and I'd estimate my reCaptcha pass rate around 20%. The puzzles are just badly done, it's not even a vision or knowledge thing.
- ardy42 8y ago
  > The puzzles are just badly done, it's not even a vision or knowledge thing. Yeah. The puzzles are terrible now, and I have a strong suspicion that they're no longer testing to see if you behave like another human, but instead testing you to see if you act like their own machine vision bot.
nurino 8y ago
This reminds me of the day I was told to select all taxis... took me some time to understand they meant "yellow cars" (taxis are white here)
- astura 8y ago
  Ummm... Huh? Taxis are a different color everywhere, there's no "standard," even NYC has green taxis ("Boro Taxis"). Yellow is a popular color, because it stands out, but I've taken taxis every color of the rainbow (well, maybe not pink or purple), each area or company is different. In my neighborhood two companies operate taxis, one has a fleet of red taxis and another has a fleet of blue taxis. From my observation, black is probably the second most common taxi color. You identify a taxi by it's markings, not it's color.
  - beojan 8y ago
    I wouldn't be surprised if users have inadvertently trained the AI behind reCAPTCHA to think all taxis are yellow.
  - nurino 8y ago
    Then it's not US-centrism but NYC-centrism? I mean you tell me to check the markings, but you know in those captchas you can't see any markings because most things look like a blurry blob.
    - astura 8y ago
      Taxis are easy to identify - cars with a (usually lit) topper and writing all over them are taxis, the writing doesn't even have to be in a language you understand to be identifiable as a taxi - you don't need to actually be able to read the writing. Other marks like checkered patterns are common, taxis are designed to stand out. New York City also has green taxis, so it's not anywhere-centric thing.

Bartweiss 8y ago

> a relatively simple puzzle I'm curious where the line on "relatively simple" is. Other people have already noted the tasks can be confusing if you're not an American English-speaker, and that the backup tasks for people with vision difficulties are nigh impossible. But beyond that: some of the time I have to do 1-3 Captcha pages, which I would class as relatively simple. Other times, I've gotten up to 10+ pages with what I believe was perfect accuracy. (They were fairly simple tasks like "click the stoplights", not the sometimes-ambiguous ones like "click the storefronts".) That's usually when I'm traveling, so it's correlated with slow internet. I don't know what the upper limit is, because there are very few pages I care about enough to push through 10+ rounds of Captcha, but I'd argue that "spending 3 minutes studying traffic photos with no end in sight" is way past my definition of 'simple'.