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Comment by CGamesPlay | Hacker News Reader

Charging for reCAPTCHA, and even removing the free tier, seems like a good win for consumers. By having a non-zero price tag, companies are forced to actually attach a monetary value to the service, which will discourage them from using it so frivolously. As it stands today, reCAPTCHA costs consumers both privacy and time, and costs the companies nothing.

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>As it stands today, reCAPTCHA costs consumers both privacy and time

Also it forces users to perform unpaid labor for Google.

That's only for huge clients - it's free if you'll have less than a million assessments per month[0].

0: https://www.google.com/recaptcha/about/#combined-table__tabl...

Why not simply just not differentiate between humans and bots, and enforce a usage policy that works for your business?

You don't want them scraping 1000 articles an hour? Just put a limit on viewing 20 articles an hour, no need to differentiate between human and robot.

The boundary between humans and robots will blur over the next few centuries. At some point it will just be a spectrum from all-inorganic to mixed to all-organic beings that roam the planet. We might as well prepare for that future by abolishing chemistryism (discrimination against organic vs. inorganic chemistry of a being) today.

(Yes this sounds stupid, but 200 years ago, abolishing racism sounded stupid too.)

Limit by what? IP? Bots are distributed across IPs while certain users share IPs (NAT, universities, etc.). Cookie? Bots won't store cookies. Overall? Then human users will be blocked outright if there's enough bots.

Humans can also create a network that are distributed across IPs.

I'm mostly human and I don't store cookies.

Yeah the amount of website laziness that reCAPTCHA has prompted is ridiculous.

Guess what, folks, every visit to your website involves some mix of humans and software. Nobody uses the web without a browser, and every browser was written by a human. You aren't entitled to make hair-splitting distinctions and dump the enforcement burden on the public.

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