meanwhile agents have been able to pass these captchas for a while now, so it's unclear what the point of them now is. It's like they want to keep out the dumb bots, but any agent with reasonable intelligence can come in.

Captcha passing services cost peanuts btw. Some also offer a browser extension that automates the API call.

> crosswalks

And their a11y/internationalisation is horrid.

We have pedestrian crossings, not crosswalks. We don't have fire hydrants (instead a different solution). We don't have yellow schoolbuses. Our traffic lights look different (and have different names in different cultures). And those examples are just the obvious problems with some captchas. Usually there are more subtle problems with verification UIs.

"Select all photos with motorcycles"

*shows 4 photos with mopeds and 0 with motorcycles*

Yes, the bot detection wait IS starting to get out of hand. As for solving a puzzle, I just exit the page and move on with my day.

This is the real hidden cost of the bots. I absolutely loathe the human verification hoops I have to jump through now, more than anything else mentioned in this thread.

Reddit blocks anonymous mobile web traffic behind a capcha now.

One way to look at this is that the internet is healing. Platforms are closing themselves off to growth and scabbing over.

I noticed an Amazon page had "log in to read the reviews". Not sure how widespread that is, but seems like a big deal if you can see item reviews w/o login

well you need to login to buy it anyway so it's not that much of a problem

IMDb does it, too.

Wait, what? I’m not sure I’ve ever used an online shop that didn’t allow you to buy things without registering, but then again I do most of my purchases in person and offline.

yesterday I visited a page with TWO! captchas side by side. When I got through the second one the first one had expired...