Captchas[edit | edit source]

The Internet has a big frigging problem. It can’t seem to tell the difference between person and machine. I’m going to jump right in and say that ‘captchas’ are NOT the answer. I repeat: captchas are not the answer. Go ahead and implement them if you want. Your users will hate you. I will hate you. Your family and extended family will hate you. Nobody likes having to fill in barely legible symbols to ‘prove’ that they’re humans. Aren’t machines supposed to work for us? So why the hell are we being asked to prove our humanity to them? Has the world gone crazy? It really feels so lately.

Maybe users could forgive the odd captcha if they weren’t so often associated with brain-dead implementations. For example, take the captcha used on 4chan. You wait 60 seconds, you fill in a captcha, you get to submit a post. At this point you should be considered ‘human’ and get to post (up until some reasonable limit.) But instead what happens is the website asks you to keep filling out captchas for almost every post. To me this seems like such a blow to what the site stood for that it’s hard for me to attribute this to anything other than malicious intent.

Registration systems[edit | edit source]

A common alternative to captchas is to use registration systems.

avg comp usage * available compute = expected rate audit(out, expected_rate, checkpoints) -> resource allocation