I've been thinking about this a lot lately. Where is our compensation? It's our time and brain power training Google's AI that will one day be sold back to us. I'm really not into this.
I don't love the compromise of paying for things with my data or by training Google's AI, but it's hard to say users aren't getting anything out of it. That said, I do miss the old reCaptcha.
Very few low-traffic blogs that I see use (or need) CAPTCHAs. I know that the ones I run don't.
> I don't love the compromise of paying for things with my data or by training Google's AI, but it's hard to say users aren't getting anything out of it.
I don't think they are getting much, if anything out of it -- aside from being increasingly punished for defending themselves against being spied on by Google.
If this somple thing comes from a popular WordPress plugin the equation for the spammer changes, of course.
But it also sucks the first day you get an attacker who solves it once and then spams you thousands of times.
Modern spam tools are pretty impressive these days and minimize the targeted work the human spammer needs to do in these cases. In the early 2000s, you could set a custom question and then assume no attacker is going to manually code for your little blog.
But even in 2008 I was using spam software (out of curiosity) where you could import a massive blog list, and it would pause spamjobs with failed comment submissions, let you pencil in a value for this unknown field, and then click resume.
You could also choose other actions for that field like "prompt me each time" and sit at your computer multiplexing your labor across hundreds of blogs. And that was pretty polished ten years ago.
Exactly :)
Fair enough, but you won't get Google's spam filter or availability either, which your privacy was paying for.
My point was just that even if something is provided to the customer for free, doesn't mean it's easy to produce. That causes a lot of the issues my non-tech friends have with understanding the scope of work. Just because social media is free and easy to set up as a customer doesn't mean developing a social media is easy at all.
Overall it’s been a good experience. I run into a few sites which when I send to them classify my email as spam or grey list my sending IP so mail doesn’t get through quickly but then I used to have the same spam problem with some sites running my own domain through google apps.
This book offers one set of proposals for "Data as Labor", inspired by Jaron Lanier: http://radicalmarkets.com/chapters/data-as-labor/
And there's going to be a lot of discussion of the idea at the RadicalxChange conference in March (https://radicalxchange.org/), including with Jaron himself as well as the book authors. (Disclosure: I do the conference website as a volunteer).
maybe to save them a few $ from bots and spam (bandwidth and storage is very cheap today) they might be losing new users by the thousands (and traffic acquisition is far more expensive than the formers)
Recaptcha isn't obnoxious for fun, it's obnoxious because this is the state of the arms race right now. There's also the challenge of creating a captcha that allows blind people in.
Labels can also be obfuscated with javascript, replacing the raw HTML "Email" with "Age"on page load. Getting this right will require the bot to parse both HTML and JS, and we can force them to handle CSS too. Add a "zip" field, and hide it with complex CSS rules. If it contains a zip code, it's a bot.
If you're really paranoid, randomise combinations of distinguishable fields (name, email, phone, age and hidden fields) every time you generate the form, so even if a bot herder manually maps names to fields one time, it'll fail the next. At this stage it'll be cheaper for the bot herder to use Mechanical Turk, after which even Google's captcha is compromised.
Accessibility is very important, and if accessibility features are implemented well they'll often be useful even to people without disabilities, but do any CS/SE or code bootcamp programs take the topic seriously? I'm sure it must be taught somewhere, but it doesn't seem to be common at all. Can you even imagine 21st century university architecture department that didn't cover ADA compliance? That'd be unthinkable.
I can easily imagine it: architecture departments from universities in other countries don't necessarily have to cover compliance with USA laws.
Or a blind user who might actually rely on both labels and names. That's a bit like what arxiv does, they have hidden links that ban your ip when you crawl, but the links aren't hidden for AT users. I got myself banned that way once.
For example, since you're here and HN uses Recaptcha on its register/login form, it seems like the compensation was adequate.
Which is one of the reasons why the presence of reCAPTCHA is strong push to avoid that site.
> since you're here and HN uses Recaptcha on its register/login form, it seems like the compensation was adequate.
Perhaps so. I don't remember doing a CAPTCHA to sign up, but I don't dispute that I did it. However, I've never been presented with one after signup. If I was, I wouldn't be here.
You give Google training for ML models.
Google gives the site provider the service of excluding bots from submitting the form.
The site provider gives you whatever was provided by the form you were trying to submit.
No one is uncompensated.
If you use my referral URL I get a bump in the queue:
First, it seems tacky scrounging for peanuts from the users' captcha work. Or it's like a product/services website showing Adsense ads. It's a cheapening message to send.
Second, since you make more money from more captcha volume, you're incentivized to maximize your use of captcha which is at odds with every complaint in this comments section about captcha. Most sites only use captcha to gate low-volume actions like register/login (e.g. HN).
They created their own Ethereum token too which always puts a bad taste in my mouth these days.
Finally, it doesn't address the upstream complaint that someone else is profiting off the user's "work" rather than the user. Though I don't find that complaint very reasonable. And a tiny fraction of a cent sounds about right. The truth is that users benefit from anti-abuse systems. The number of bots that HN's recaptcha on register/login has stopped is worth that tiny fraction of a cent to most users.
Sites can set the difficulty level necessary for their application. Some are under continual targeted attack, others are mainly keeping out rogue automated spambots from their comments section.
The user is typically getting a free service, a better site experience due to less bot traffic, or both. I think sharing the value of their work with the website is a fair deal.
As for using blockchain tech for ledger functions, that is all under the hood: websites can cash out to dollars as they prefer.
(disclosure: work on bot detection at hCaptcha.com)
Yes, mainly because we're talking about fractions of cents. Also, it's not for free; the website and its users get a good anti-abuse measure in return.
There's a big difference between something that cannot make money and something that makes pennies for the site. But, to be fair, 99.9% of users aren't going to notice the difference in captcha branding either way unlike my example of a banner ad on a retail site.
My main reaction is that the UX incentive to minimize user exposure to captchas seems to work against the primary pull of using hcaptcha in the first place.
Though one site I can think of that has a captcha behind every action (every post) is 4chan. Maybe you can get them on hcaptcha one day. It would at least help you test your tagging system against vandalism. :)
I didn't find any pricing examples on hcaptcha's website. For all I know, people are bidding 5 cents per image.
Anyways, I definitely want to see more serious contenders in the captcha space so that we all aren't contributing to Google's middle-manning of the entire internet, and I'd like to try hcaptcha even out of curiosity.
If it means no/fewer ads to support a site then the user benefits because they don't have to pay real money to keep the site up.
When you search for an address on google maps, that little tiny house number on the house was once a captcha image and now google knows that number so it can take you to the exact location on a map when you search for that number.
Everyone helps train the machine so when they want something from the machine then the machine is better at finding what they asked for. That seems pretty democratic to me.
disclaimer: work for google, nothing related to reCAPTCHA though. opinions are my own, etc.
A dividend on this could probably provide for a basic income.
Is it worth it?