Captchas are primarily to punish users for not allowing tracking, or using the “right” services, they may prevent some bots as a side effect (or a pretence from the provider) but it’s mostly for google and cloudflare to abuse their monopolies.
They protect free speech and allow Tor users. Ever tried completing a reCaptcha on Tor?
https://blog.cloudflare.com/introducing-pay-per-crawl/
https://developers.cloudflare.com/browser-run/quick-actions/...
They create a new problem and sell the solution.
There may be things to criticize Cloudflare for, but the problem of bots and scrapers destroying the open web was getting worse no matter what.
My take is that it's a very hard problem, so hard that even captchas by the biggest internet company can't get it right. I strongly hesitate to roll my own bot friction strategy when other tools are available. But I recognize I may have a lack of imagination here, would absolutely love to hear alternate ideas especially for small projects that may not need the heft of corporate captchas.
Our reason for this is to try to make HN as good as possible for its real users.
The reason captchas bother me so much is they always seem to happen in the course of legitimate activities. Like I had one when trying to make a charity donation, or ordering something - I have no idea why it would be hard to distinguish such traffic as legitimate, I’m convinced it’s because I’m using a nonstandard browser, not allowing cookies, etc.
If I was trying an automation or to bulk download something or whatever, I’d take the captcha as an interesting professional challenge. When I’m trying to use someone’s services or pay them money, it’s just ridiculous friction and I generally abandon any transaction that makes me do a captcha.
Incidentally I have scraped HN and never encountered any problems, since you have an api for it