this post was submitted on 09 Feb 2025
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[–] pixxelkick 17 points 1 day ago (18 children)

It's a free service that's been provided to website makers to easily add a way to reduce bot spam. And for a very long time, it worked

Captcha got tonnes of free training data, and in return website maintainer got an incredibly handy free tool to help secure their site.

Captcha 100% could have charged licensing for their tool, could charged money for developers to use their service.

They didn't, and I think it's perfectly reasonable they got the training data as "payment" instead.

Your favorite free websites you use get to have another part of their architecture stay free.

The website maintainer get an awesome free tool.

Captcha got training data to profit off of.

That's good internet where everyone wins without the need for bullshit licensing and fees and royalties and subscriptions.

Would you have rather your Netflix account cost an extra 15 cents per month or whatever to offset yet another licensing cost for some captcha tool?

[–] xektop -3 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (5 children)

Captcha was never good at stopping bots. It was always used to identify who is a human. In other words exactly the opposite of what you think.

Edit: because I see confusion, maybe a language barrier, here is an example of what people think it is and how it works: https://youtube.com/shorts/rme6PT7-CRI?si=iGx_v7Qp7oYqJQ3S Which is wrong on many levels.

Here is a better explanation of what I meant: https://youtu.be/VTsBP21-XpI?si=viw0FEMffyhyba9v

Hope this explains it better than my original comment.

[–] pixxelkick 25 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I can personally confirm it very much did help curb botting issues on my website.

[–] taiyang 11 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Seconded, websites with logins are practically unusable without the tool. We had to disable it once and our database got flooded by unverified accounts. Absolutely awful.

[–] xektop 1 points 1 day ago

I have edited my original comment, but this will explain it much better and showcase my statement much better: https://youtu.be/VTsBP21-XpI?si=viw0FEMffyhyba9v

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