All captchas I have seen were used to stop spam. The problem with spam is that 1) it's noise and 2) appears in large amounts. Captchas approach the problem 1),

All captchas I have seen were used to stop spam. The problem with spam is that 1) it's noise and 2) appears in large amounts. Captchas approach the problem 1), by assuring only people can post and then hopefully increase the signal quality. It sucks because it requires mental effort, is hard on people with disabilities, blocks potentially useful bots (see reddit bots) and leads to an arms race. What if we tried to solve the problem 2)? One possible solution is requiring a proof of work. Some computation that requires a few seconds, easily disguised while the user is typing the comment or filling the fields. It's an old idea but I've never seen an implementation in the wild. (yes, it would fail for mobile devices. fall back to captcha or something)