Why do you see CloudFlare CAPTCHAs when using TOR

Gotta say, this is one of the most frustrating parts of using Tor.

For fun, I decided to try it out a few months ago after reading a few articles. Nearly every single site I went to visit required me to click on pictures of lakes, store fronts, street signs, street names and such. Often times after selecting an item, another would appear below it. This would repeat at least twice, but in some cases I received as many as 4. Not once did I receive a simple, single image CAPTCHA. All were multiple image based adding minutes to the time it took to get to a site on an already quite slow Tor connection. Visit a site that references images on an address different from the one you're visiting and they all fail to load resulting in pages that render terribly. Worse, it's not obvious why it's happening until you attempt to pull one of those images up by URL where you're provided another CAPTCHA to answer. Finally, the page renders as expected.

That was frustrating. I was unconcerned with my own privacy since I was using it for fun, so I enabled all of the script options and decided to do a Google search. They at least provided a single image CAPTCHA which would have been fine if it ever went away. I entered the correct value for the wavy text ten times before giving up.

I feel awful for those using Tor to bypass censorship. Instead of just being saddled with a moderately slower browsing experience, they're encumbered by a mess of other hurdles. It's a shame but I can't say that I'm sure what alternatives exist for protecting sites from bad actors that use Tor to hide attacks.

While it's nice they allow users to unblock Tor users, I have a problem with their being a "block" option. It's essentially censorship-as-a-service.