I wouldn't mind CAPTCHA hell so much if the tasks I was doing were benefiting libre projects that everyone could draw on, like OpenStreetMap or Wikipedia. The offensive thing about CAPTCHA is that your work is for the sole sake of improving one corporation’s product.

That would be a great idea for a captcha project! You might wanna post to open-source-ideas: https://github.com/open-source-ideas/open-source-ideas

There are already alternative CAPTCHA projects. The problem is that the most-visited websites on the internet never adopted them, instead content to use Google's solution.

I thought this was in lieu of payment...

Tell me about it. Even using Firefox with a couple of adblocking lists is enough for Google to think I'm high risk enough to need a half dozen captchas.

I know right, everytime there's a website with reCaptcha on it it makes me fail two times to pass at the third. Tiles takes ages to load and fade to display new ones.

I like to do comparisons with Chromium based browsers on the exact same site, how much time it takes to pass the captcha. Obviously the chromium based one is way faster to solve.

I don't really know why Google makes it this way. If it's only because of my Firefox configuration that makes Google think I'm a bot. Or if Google can't retrieve enough data on my browsing habits to bother me and force me (in a way) to browse on a chromium based browser.

The thing is I never saw informations talking about it, so I'll pass on denouncing Google's behavior.

For those interested there's a good browser add-on to bypass reCaptchas : Buster [1]

[1] : https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/buster-captch...

Exactly the same story, exactly the same solution. What I didn't know: my ad blocker and Buster are from the same person, good guy this raymond hill.

Yeah. Feels like I'm being punished for daring to resist their surveillance capitalism.

They use hCaptcha now which is even worse as it requires us to do two tasks.

Unfortunately, sites are far more likely to just block such a risky connection and write off the opportunity cost.