Captcha was never good at stopping bots. It was always used to identify who is a human. In other words exactly the opposite of what you think.
Edit: because I see confusion, maybe a language barrier, here is an example of what people think it is and how it works:
https://youtube.com/shorts/rme6PT7-CRI
Which is wrong on many levels.
Not easily, and not at the time, no, it really was a very easy way to quickly reduce bot problems at the time.
You’d get random spam for stuff that could flood your forums or etc, and setting up captcha had an extremely immediate and palpable effect on reducing the spam that came in from random bot farms and shit.
I can personally confirm that when I implemented captcha on my forums i maintained 14 years ago, it pretty substantially reduced spammers by a huge degree.
There’s no point in arguing what once was. Things have changed. CAPTCHAs are now less effective, far more invasive, and for many people, far more troublesome.
Cling to them if you like. I no longer use them on any of my sites, because I care about my users.
It’s a free service that’s been provided to website makers to easily add a way to reduce bot spam. And for a very long time, it worked
Captcha got tonnes of free training data, and in return website maintainer got an incredibly handy free tool to help secure their site.
Captcha 100% could have charged licensing for their tool, could charged money for developers to use their service.
They didn’t, and I think it’s perfectly reasonable they got the training data as “payment” instead.
Your favorite free websites you use get to have another part of their architecture stay free.
The website maintainer get an awesome free tool.
Captcha got training data to profit off of.
That’s good internet where everyone wins without the need for bullshit licensing and fees and royalties and subscriptions.
Would you have rather your Netflix account cost an extra 15 cents per month or whatever to offset yet another licensing cost for some captcha tool?
Captcha was never good at stopping bots. It was always used to identify who is a human. In other words exactly the opposite of what you think.
Edit: because I see confusion, maybe a language barrier, here is an example of what people think it is and how it works: https://youtube.com/shorts/rme6PT7-CRI Which is wrong on many levels.
Here is a better explanation of what I meant: https://youtu.be/VTsBP21-XpI
Hope this explains it better than my original comment.
That doesn’t make sense. There are only bots and humans. Identifying humans is stopping bots, and vice versa.
I can personally confirm it very much did help curb botting issues on my website.
CAPTCHAs make web sites awful to use, and waste the limited lifespans of billions of people.
There are other ways to manage bots.
Not easily, and not at the time, no, it really was a very easy way to quickly reduce bot problems at the time.
You’d get random spam for stuff that could flood your forums or etc, and setting up captcha had an extremely immediate and palpable effect on reducing the spam that came in from random bot farms and shit.
I can personally confirm that when I implemented captcha on my forums i maintained 14 years ago, it pretty substantially reduced spammers by a huge degree.
There’s no point in arguing what once was. Things have changed. CAPTCHAs are now less effective, far more invasive, and for many people, far more troublesome.
Cling to them if you like. I no longer use them on any of my sites, because I care about my users.