4 ms·
Sure, but you shouldn't undermine the mission of successfully recording words that can't be identified. It's a pretty noble goal, actually.
by rotskoff 14y ago
Sure, but you shouldn't undermine the mission of successfully recording words that can't be identified. It's a pretty noble goal, actually.
- danilocampos 14y agoTheir goal isn't more important than my goal of resetting my password or logging in.
- slowpoke 14y agoI, for one, refuse to be used as the source of free labor by Google just because I want to sign up for a website.
- praxulus 14y agoThat's ridiculous. reCAPTCHA isn't making you do more work, it's just making work you have to do anyway useful. The benefit Google gets from the OCR work is microscopic, and the world gets old books and New York Times articles.
- slowpoke 14y agoSee, I would have much less of a problem with this if Google actually told this to everyone. Instead, they silently use you for free labor. That's dishonest. I'm all in for crowdsourcing if you tell me about it and nicely ask me to participate. Not when I am forced to do it.
- quarterto 14y agoIt says right there on the reCAPTCHA widget "Stop spam, read books". How is that dishonest?
- icebraining 14y agoFrom the landing page of reCaptcha: "reCAPTCHA IS A FREE ANTI-BOT SERVICE THAT HELPS DIGITIZE BOOKS". The "What is reCAPTCHA" explains the OCR process clearly and has the phrase "Currently, we are helping to digitize old editions of the New York Times and books from Google Books." And if you click on the "HELP" link in a reCAPTCHA, it opens a small page with the instructions and a paragraph explain the OCR and a link to Learn More. How are they _not_ telling this to everyone?
- slowpoke 14y agoI'm actually wrong on this one, I see. Might be because I don't even really look at the widget itself anymore, I just type it.
- tomjen3 14y agoAsk twenty regular users who have been forced to fill that crap out. Nobody reads the about page. Put it on the front page (or the embedded widget, if that is what the user sees) in clear large letters that are easy to see or accept that we consider you scum.
- icebraining 14y ago(They do put it on the front page, I already pointed that out) So, assuming you don't consider HN scum (you're here, after all), can you please explain to me how is this different from YCombinator using HN to publicize their own companies? There's nothing in the front or signup pages explaining that. Frankly, I don't see why is that a problem. They're offering a free service in exchange for having words manually OCRed. If you have a problem with it I think you should take it to the site that's using reCaptcha, not with Google. (By the way, I'm not affiliated with Google and I'm not even an heavy user of their services anymore)
- eitland 14y agoBy that logic people I think people should also shred newspapers to make sure someone isn't reading them for free after they have finished them and then soak them in water and add a little sand and oil to make them impossible to recycle and unusable as fuel in furnaces. And stop releasing source code, at least under any sane license. If it doesn't add extra burden to you (assuming there would just be another captcha that didn't end up feeding googles scanning effort), why do you care?
- brigade 14y agoEveryone entering something different is just as valid as entering nothing at all for determining whether a word is identifiable. Even more so actually, since a null response has at least four distinct meanings that I can think of. (user took too long to enter captcha, user couldn't read OCR word, user couldn't read control word, and user didn't feel like entering OCR word)
- mikeash 14y agoIf I encounter a broken captcha that I have to work around, it's not me who's undermining the mission.
- Zenst 14y agoHow do you work around a broken captcha? You don't you just hit the little refresh icon most have and get a new one.
- tomjen3 14y agoI would destroy it if I could. If they want to. If they want we me to scan old books, they bloody better pay me.