It’s a double-edged sword. Just because it doesn’t work perfectly doesn’t mean it doesn’t work.
To a spammer, building something with the ability to break a captcha is more expensive than something that cannot, whether in terms of development time, or resource demands.
We saw with a few Lemmy instances that they’re still good at protecting instances from bots and bot signups. Removing captchas entirely means erasing that barrier of entry that keeps a lot of bots out, and might cause more problems than it fixes.
Problem is this assumes that everyone has to build their own captcha solver. It’s definitely a bare minimum standard barrier to entry, but it’s really not a sustainable solution to begin with.
So is it time to get rid of them then? Usually when I encounter one of those “click the motorcycles” I just go read something else.
It’s a double-edged sword. Just because it doesn’t work perfectly doesn’t mean it doesn’t work.
To a spammer, building something with the ability to break a captcha is more expensive than something that cannot, whether in terms of development time, or resource demands.
We saw with a few Lemmy instances that they’re still good at protecting instances from bots and bot signups. Removing captchas entirely means erasing that barrier of entry that keeps a lot of bots out, and might cause more problems than it fixes.
Problem is this assumes that everyone has to build their own captcha solver. It’s definitely a bare minimum standard barrier to entry, but it’s really not a sustainable solution to begin with.