Besides, if a relatively simple puzzle is too much to ask, then maybe you didn't care all that much to begin with. I can think of various platforms where this would be a good filter even if there was no such thing as abuse. ;)
Nobody is claiming it's perfect. But notice how nobody here is analyzing why people use ReCaptcha in the first place nor providing alternatives.
If you knew nothing of ReCaptcha and only read these comments, you'd wonder if it was a gag website operators put on their website for self-amusement, which is basically how I looked at homework as a kid. But I feel like this discussion is a bit more one-sided than I expected on HN, a place where I would've thought more people had experience running a website and how immediately effective ReCaptcha was the second you added a <textarea>.
Once again, all trails lead back to you providing some alternative solutions instead of the empty catharsis of coming up with downsides to something in an internet comment.
Here's one of my own: Isn't it annoying that spambots show up the second I launch a website? Ugh! Well, got that out of the way. Now I need a solution.
What's yours?
On the contrary, many websites use it as an initial gate before I get to see anything.
It's not about disliking anti-spam measures, it's about highlighting the woeful method that is re-captcha.
"Select all squares with street signs" shows a bunch of squares, some of them contain only part of the pole that presumably has a sign attached out of shot. So do you click that square that only has the pole? A pole is not a sign, it's a piece of steel. But it's part of the sign, so are people expected to select it or not?
Re-captcha is not a smart system.
Guess we can close the file on that one.
Honestly, you're kind of insulting the intelligence of most people without a US cultural background.
I've lived my whole life in the US and have about 20/20 vision (used to be slightly better than 20/15), and I'd estimate my reCaptcha pass rate around 20%.
The puzzles are just badly done, it's not even a vision or knowledge thing.
Yeah. The puzzles are terrible now, and I have a strong suspicion that they're no longer testing to see if you behave like another human, but instead testing you to see if you act like their own machine vision bot.
Taxis are a different color everywhere, there's no "standard," even NYC has green taxis ("Boro Taxis"). Yellow is a popular color, because it stands out, but I've taken taxis every color of the rainbow (well, maybe not pink or purple), each area or company is different.
In my neighborhood two companies operate taxis, one has a fleet of red taxis and another has a fleet of blue taxis. From my observation, black is probably the second most common taxi color.
You identify a taxi by it's markings, not it's color.
I mean you tell me to check the markings, but you know in those captchas you can't see any markings because most things look like a blurry blob.
New York City also has green taxis, so it's not anywhere-centric thing.
I'm curious where the line on "relatively simple" is.
Other people have already noted the tasks can be confusing if you're not an American English-speaker, and that the backup tasks for people with vision difficulties are nigh impossible.
But beyond that: some of the time I have to do 1-3 Captcha pages, which I would class as relatively simple. Other times, I've gotten up to 10+ pages with what I believe was perfect accuracy. (They were fairly simple tasks like "click the stoplights", not the sometimes-ambiguous ones like "click the storefronts".) That's usually when I'm traveling, so it's correlated with slow internet. I don't know what the upper limit is, because there are very few pages I care about enough to push through 10+ rounds of Captcha, but I'd argue that "spending 3 minutes studying traffic photos with no end in sight" is way past my definition of 'simple'.