Comment by renlo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by renlo | Hacker News Reader

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I’ve had a number of reCAPTCHA incidents where I could not pass the test for tens of images, it was a very frustrating experience. Please do not use reCAPTCHA.

The items one is supposed to select often overlap the grids, so it becomes a kind of Keynesian Beauty Contest[1] at that point; I assume they validate based on how much in alignment you are with previous answers, so it becomes a problem of “What nearby grids would a person reasonably select when there’s overlap”, or, you’re tasked at selecting <some_item> and you see <some_item> in the distant background of the image you’re supposed to classify and you need to determine “How visible would <some_item> need to be for a reasonable person to classify <some_item> as being in this image”.

On top of this, when you’re clicking through image after image after image, the additional frustrating thing is that you’re helping train their algorithms; you’re doing work because their service isn’t smart enough to know you’re human, or, you’re seen as a marginal customer they can piss off by forcing you to work for them for free.

It’s a frustrating experience when it fails, and my current strategy is to leave the website when the ‘I’m not a robot’ checkbox fails.

[1]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keynesian_beauty_contest

You’re overthinking it. I have had a similar experience. The worst were the “stop light” questions. Does it mean the pole, the light, the tiny corner overlapping another square? I used to try to include everything as it was technically true. Very frustrating – until I finally started to not care. Click on the most obvious pictures. Click click click. Done. Get it wrong? Click click click on the next one. Way faster with a much better success rate doing so. It usually only takes a couple of tries now.

"Store front" always makes me squint at garages, driveways, sidewalks and front doors.

Just a suggestion to not say "You're overthinking it" it can be considered pretty dismissive.

Maybe a cultural thing? For me, "you're over thinking it" is a familiar/friendly way of expressing an idea, similar to how you would approach a friend. It was not intended to be dismissive.

you are right. it is a cultural thing. that being said, the advice is sound. the internet is a mishmash of cultures :) if i would bring my culture to the internet, everyone would think i'm troll or horrible person. just because ppl from my culture are a bit direct and cynical :D if you'd like people to respect and take into account your culture it's good to do vice versa.

now that's over thinking :D

You're overthinking that.

Hell I try to figure out what wrong answers to give to fuck up their training data.

That would only work if everyone who got the same image gave the same wrong answer. Otherwise, the system just keeps sending the same image to more random people until it's satisfied with the consensus. Also, it keeps sending YOU more random images if you obviously don't comply with previously observed consensus.

reCAPTCHA is horrible. I am almost certain that some tests are intentionally marked as failed even if they are correct, simply so they can get more training in. And if you take any anonymizing measures, reCAPTCHA makes much of the web nigh impossible to use.

It's easily the worst UX I encounter online. I can't describe the relief I feel when I come across a "normal" CAPTCHA. It's coming to the point that if I could pay a few cents to outsource every reCAPTCHA, I gladly would simply to avoid this atrocity.

The tests are often poorly defined. I've been caught in reCAPTCHA hell a few times (but not recently), and it's often the case that I'm guessing... is this a bus? I'm not sure.

It's interesting to find out that this might have nothing to do with my ability or inability to recognize objects in blurry photos.

Are reCAPTCHA images used to train or classify data like Mechanical Turk? I thought at one point the word ones were used that way and was a major incentive for their usage.

Original reCAPTCHA images were used to transcribe text for Google Books, and later to transcribe house numbers for Google Street View.

I don't think Google's publicly said what they do with any data derived from the new "I'm not a robot" reCAPTCHA, but, given the content it usually uses, it seems likely that they're still using it for image classification in Street View, or for their self-driving car projects.

They are almost certainly being used to train Google's self-driving/Maps/etc recognition.

You probably share your IP with others like Tor or a single IP for a big company.

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