In my opinion and experience, ReCAPTCHA isn't really, really obnoxious most of the time. I suspect that most of the time it trips up bots who have no emotional experiences whatsoever. Most of my personal encounters with it involve solving no puzzles whatsoever. With that in mind, I expect humans and their completely real reactions might not be the default case. Of course, this is speculative, as I do not have any kind of special data on the subject.
Thank you for sharing! Have you considered the possibility that presenting any message at all - especially one with a clear block time - is sending a very clear message to bot controllers? I'm sure you've considered this, and I am just failing to understand. Wouldn't that remove any real gains from being vague with tips & tricks?
Wouldn't there also be the real chance that vague tips & tricks would leave an actual human being in tears, convinced that they're just too dumb to understand them properly?
> I suspect that most of the time it trips up bots who have no emotional experiences whatsoever.
I'll bite: maybe it's good at identifying obedient drones and letting them through :)
It trips up the normies in my life often enough that I suspect being technically inclined is actually a net advantage because it makes you quick to detect the problem and quick to apply workarounds. Those advantages are significant enough to outweigh even the cost of the semi-regular dance where I try to protect myself and Google jerks my chain.
> Have you considered
The fact that I phrased my proposal as a tradeoff should have strongly hinted that I did, in fact, consider.
> Wouldn't that remove any real gains from being vague with tips & tricks?
One bit of information -- locked vs not -- is hardly the same as disclosing the inner workings, or even the information inputs, of the classifier, and smart botters have access to that bit of information anyway because they've built a gaslight detector by leveraging their legions of diverse bots and endless supply of dirt cheap human labor.
Gaslighting humans is really bad. A minimal courtesy would only cost a sliver of efficacy, and ReCAPTCHA still rejects it. That decision earns it the bad will directed its way.
> In my opinion and experience, ReCAPTCHA isn't really, really obnoxious most of the time.
Do you use any sort of privacy protection while browsing? I do a few simple things like browse in private mode by default, and ReCAPTCHA just cannot deal with it. It instantly brands my connections as a bot. It is obnoxious. Using private mode shouldn't ban you from the web. There's no reason that most web sites need to save data on my computer to identify me later.
I don't think Chrome has ever been my daily driver.
That said, I also expect to be treated with more suspicion when I behave more like a bot. So I'm neither surprised nor bothered when Firefox Private gets me an uptick in ReCAPTCHAs. I understand that this is a highly unusual expectation.
Thank you for sharing! Have you considered the possibility that presenting any message at all - especially one with a clear block time - is sending a very clear message to bot controllers? I'm sure you've considered this, and I am just failing to understand. Wouldn't that remove any real gains from being vague with tips & tricks?
Wouldn't there also be the real chance that vague tips & tricks would leave an actual human being in tears, convinced that they're just too dumb to understand them properly?