Well, they absolutely do work. They work so well that they've reduced bot actions by almost 100% on our sites.

We wouldn't use Recaptcha if there wasn't abuse on the internet. But, unfortunately, there is. There is a sobering amount of it.

I'm actually curious about all these posts suggesting that websites use Recaptcha for no real reason or for some trivial reason. To me, it suggests a massive misunderstanding that people have about the internet.

It's certainly something to worry about, but how about this angle: abuse is getting so cheap and hard to prevent that we're electing the aid of complicated systems engineered by large corporations like Google. That scares me, but not from a Google=bad standpoint. It indicates that the internet has fundamental problems that make abuse trivial, and that's a different discussion worth having, but it's a much harder one than Google=bad. Probably less cathartic, too.

Obviously it comes with downsides, but it's a trade-off. Nobody uses Recaptcha for fun.

As I reminded a sibling comment, even HN uses Recaptcha on its login/register page. There's no telling how many fewer spambots we have to deal with every day because of it, yet we're somehow here discussing whether Recaptcha servers a purpose while profiting from it. :)

Or we’ve just managed to notice that CAPTCHAs don’t seem to keep millions of bots, spammers, dummy accounts, shills, etc off the net. I’m glad you’re having such perceived success, but it’s not a universal phenomenon.

Do you run a service that needs to prevent abuse at scale? What exactly is your Recaptcha replacement?

It's very easy to complain about the inconvenience of Recaptcha, but I'd like to see less of that and more constructive conversation about what all these supposed alternatives are, because all I see is "you don't need it" which is merely a reminder that, understandably, most people aren't running sites at a scale that attract abuse.

Even HN uses Recaptcha. Check out the login/register page.