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Comment by rgovostes | Hacker News Reader

> over the next few days, the absolute top priority is finding and suspending any verified bots/trolls/spam.

Would it improve the situation to simply require a CAPTCHA once per day per non-subscriber to tweet? I would think it would greatly increase the cost to operate a troll farm, but have minimal impact on real users (setting aside accessibility and third-party clients a moment). If it causes attrition because some people decide it's not worth two seconds of clicking fire hydrants to voice their thought, nothing of value was lost.

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> some people decide it's not worth two seconds of clicking fire hydrants

My reaction when I get the fire hydrants/traffic lights/whatever thing is to not bother and close the site. It's not because I can't spare two seconds, but because from past experience I know that whenever I get this it's an unending captcha hell.

It seems that these days the only time you're given a captcha is when some AI somewhere already decided that you're a bad actor and won't let you to the site, no matter how diligently you keep clicking page after pages of challenges.

Do you use a vpn?

Firefox on Linux is sometimes more than enough to trigger endless rounds of Captcha.

This. My attention is worth more than that.

Right? The reward for identifying all the traffic lights is that you get to identify all the boats, then all the stop signs. Wait, what were you trying to do again?

You're also training google's robots to be more human-like.

They better produce the most advanced fire hydrant detecting AI the world's ever seen or this'll all have been a gigantic waste of time.

Captcha solvers charge less than $4 per 1000 solved captchas. It'd likely still be worth it to do that sort of spam.

Hopefully it wouldn't make the well-funded bots more successful.

I can't see a reason they would become more successful if there is less competition. It's not like they are not sending spam if someone else has spammed a target recently lol.

There is reCAPTCHA version where the visual challenge for users is not required with almost the same accuracy. https://cloud.google.com/recaptcha-enterprise/docs/choose-ke...

I spent less than a dollar one day to automate solving some stupid government website form that i was scraping data from. I have no experience in that but it was pretty easy and captchas are close to worthless for any bad actor with even half a brain

You’d need to do this TO the subscribers because the problem he’s trying to address is that now there’s a bunch of fake people with a “verified” status who are running scams on people or polluting news (like Fake Verified Labron James trade news going wild before realizing, wait, it’s a fake).

So then the downside is that you start bouncing people because is a checkmark worth getting captchas? Or maybe you put captchas on everyone so that the experience blows for everyone, and pray it helps?

Or maybe you just don’t conflate paying $8 with being “verified”, unless you’re gonna, yknow, verify something.

Not a bad idea, but, like, Elon's just gonna change his mind again by next week.

"We've dispatched a Tesla Model 3 to your current browser's location. To verify you are not a robot you must drive it for one hour and achieve a better Safety Score than the built-in autopilot is capable of achieving."

There are already clickworker farms that will solve CAPTCHAs as a service. A CAPTCHA once per day would cost next to nothing for a bot farm.

Use the 4chan captchas those are the hardest things ive done since calculus

I bet this will be the code:

    bots
    |> List.filter isNotTeslaBot
    |> removeBots

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