It's more of an attempt at a steelman. Just for the record, I don't like the current centralized internet; I've all but deactivated my facebook account; when a

It's more of an attempt at a steelman. Just for the record, I don't like the current centralized internet; I've all but deactivated my facebook account; when a site requires a Google or Facebook verified login ID without their own "create account" option I avoid them at all costs; I avoid Paypal now because there are better alternatives (but in the early '00s, I would not have trusted most sites enough to pay with a card). And so on. I'm not trying to advocate for their position, but just understand the problems that they solve and why we got here. And while I hate using recaptcha, I also had the even more unpleasant experience of watching a forum that I moderated die under a crushing assault of spam bots that were smart enough to make it past the built-in CAPTCHA. Recaptcha isn't there to solve problems for the people who interact with it, it's solving problems for the people who chose to put it on their site. I wrote in a sibling comment what value Facebook's login brings to the sites that opt into it. (Offload all the work of password handling, claims about stolen accounts, preventing sockpuppetry and catfishing, etc).