Disclaimer: I've been an engineer at hCaptcha for a few years now building out the service. I'm just as interested in you as hearing about customer and user success/pain stories!
> Worth noting that this title is primarily due to Cloudflare having switched to them from ReCAPTCHA, and Cloudflare is... well, relatively popular, to say the least.
That's definitely a part of it, but we also have a number of other large sites and services that use hCaptcha to protect against bots, and more that get added every day because of our more advanced bot detection special sauce.
> I'm curious what kind of data may exist on the experience of switching for larger providers; do the users like it? how much more/less time do they spend solving? do they care, let alone even notice that it's not Google's ReCAPTCHA?
From what we've seen, the integration process is generally smooth, especially if you're a previous reCAPTCHA user, since we keep the interface and workflow largely the same.
Solving is roughly the same although we have a number of other protections that irritate bot maintainers and get activated when we detect them.
Not sure if the majority of people are aware of the change, I'm sure some technically savvy people pick up on it more than not.
> Regardless, as ReCAPTCHA is not only terribly annoying but also built for surveillance from the ground up, I still view this as a good improvement.
That's actually one the top reasons we've had a lot of customers come over to us; we put a heavy emphasis on user privacy / security, including adopting/supporting privacy-preserving protocols (PrivacyPass, Tor), and minimal retention of data (see our data privacy policy on our site).