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Well, they absolutely do work. They work so well that they've reduced bot actions by almost 100% on our sites. We wouldn't use Recaptcha if there wasn't abuse o

Well, they absolutely do work. They work so well that they've reduced bot actions by almost 100% on our sites. We wouldn't use Recaptcha if there wasn't abuse on the internet. But, unfortunately, there is. There is a sobering amount of it. I'm actually curious about all these posts suggesting that websites use Recaptcha for no real reason or for some trivial reason. To me, it suggests a massive misunderstanding that people have about the internet. Or we’ve just managed to notice that CAPTCHAs don’t seem to keep millions of bots, spammers, dummy accounts, shills, etc off the net. I’m glad you’re having such perceived success, but it’s not a universal phenomenon.

hombre_fatal 8y ago
Captchas do do that. They can't do everything, but they are an incredibly powerful tool. Do you run a service that needs to prevent abuse at scale? What exactly is your Recaptcha replacement? It's very easy to complain about the inconvenience of Recaptcha, but I'd like to see less of that and more constructive conversation about what all these supposed alternatives are, because all I see is "you don't need it" which is merely a reminder that, understandably, most people aren't running sites at a scale that attract abuse. Even HN uses Recaptcha. Check out the login/register page.