It's about stealing from you.
However, there are loads of captcha solving services you can sign up to that just solve them for you for basically free. For example, 2captcha. You install a browser extension and it just solves them for you.
Still ridiculous you have to do this.
all just so they can save 50c on bandwidth for bots against a public data website.
After I did my best to solve 25 tests, I learned that non-warranty support form is equally customer-hostile. When I called them by phone, they told me that filling out the form is the only way to open warranty case.
I went to their physical store and only after hearing magic phrase "full refund", they were interested in doing warranty repair. I went with the refund. Fuck Sony.
Also you should report them to consumer protection watchdogs.
> I'd rather have one time magic links and codes via text and email than a captcha
I couldn't agree more.
> I abandon 1 in 10 captchas recently
I started abandoning 99 out of 100 a few years back. They are too common, and too much of a hassle, and it's very rare the the site they're in front of is valuable enough to me to be worth putting up with them.
There are a handful of things that are making the web decreasingly usefulto me, and captchas are one of them.
Mostly I won't sign up to a service that has a captcha unless I know in advance it's a service I need (unlikely), it's an immediate click away.
I'd rather have one time magic links and codes via text and email than a captcha.
Inconvenience that is robotic on my behalf (copy a code from here to there and treat this as part of "something you have") is much preferred over something that is demanding on my behalf (interpret this puzzle we're showing you, and pause the context you were in to now solve the puzzle).
The worst recent offenders are a grid of 9 abstract representations of something with the instruction to click the one that is correct (right way up), which is only as good as those generated images. Next up is the ones where you need to click images that are in certain "orbits" depending on what the object in orbit is. And of course the never-ending hell of solving Google Captchas where you must pick American English items and perform several leaps of "maybe the computer thinks this is a staircase or bridge?" when what you say and it thinks clearly disagreed.
Captchas are nothing but friction, they've become too hard for humans and too trivial for machines, and the result is that they are only friction to humans... the very humans you want to extract time, money and attention from.