I feel like users should be compensated for giving Google their time and mental energy since this is literally making users manually tag their machine-learning corpus for free.
I always feel dirty when completing them, for this exact reason. Most places I'll just leave, unless I absolutely must reach the website.
The way I see it, you have two options:
- Allow Google to extensively track all your activity online, or
- Do free work for Google
And Google's convinced many webmasters to embed their recaptcha, so no matter where I go I have to give something up to Google. At least I felt better about it when I was helping OCR books.
> Thats just how the internet work. Content must be paid for somehow.
Not true. Some (most?) of the best content on the internet is there completely for free, because people believe in it and put it out there out of their own pocket.
The internet is worse, because of the content that is paid for by the methods you describe, than the internet of the 90s when content was there by the methods I just described.
I do think there's some value in paying artists and writers for their work, with, you know, money, because those people have to eat too. But I refuse to buy into this narrative where "I pay you for content and you give me content" (a consensual transaction) is the same as "I request content from you and you pretend to give it to me for free while secretly violating my privacy, stealing my attention, and otherwise screwing me without my consent". These are not the same thing.
This is not "just how the internet works", it's how a few people have decided they want the internet to work because it's profitable to them, and we don't have to put up with it.
> The internet is worse, because of the content that is paid for by the methods you describe, than the internet of the 90s...
Yeah, when people comment that online content must be subsidized, I always find it a little ironic. They're contributing information and analysis to a discussion. Who's paying the subscription fee?
How could such a lifestyle, where they give away their mental energy for free, possibly be sustainable?
The frequent rebuttal of "but my comments are low quality and barely worth anyone's time!" is fun too.
Let us analyze this further. Suppose that Alice browses 4chan. 4chan uses a Google image-classifying captcha. Alice is viewing user-generated content posted for free, including 4chan advertisements. When Alice chooses to post, she completes a captcha for Google and her post is sent to 4chan.
Who gets paid for 4chan's content? Alice does not profit. 4chan's users do not profit. 4chan 'profits' via advertising revenue but they actually operate at a loss.
Who is left to get paid? Google. Google gets a human-completed captcha for its machine-learning projects.
I look forward to the demise of the Web and its replacement with a content-addressed alternative where your views will be technologically obsolete.
Alice profits by not having her post be drowned out by a flood of automated spam. 4chan's users benefit by not having to look for interesting content among a flood of automated spam. 4chan's operators benefit by not having to moderate a flood of automated spam.
If captchas weren't useful to 4chan, they wouldn't make use of it. When you see a system that's obviously not beneficial to anyone, it's useful to take a step back and think about the incentives that keep things as they are. Because if it's so obviously wrong, why hasn't it been changed yet?
I'm not sure how a content-addressed web would handle these problems, but there'll need to be some hoops to jump through before a significant number of other people become willing to look at your content.
The PlayStation store, where literally the point is to pay for content, puts a reCaptcha on log in, and (for me) it quite often triggers the "Please flag all images containing cars/signs/shop fronts" version.
The way I see it, you have two options:
- Allow Google to extensively track all your activity online, or
- Do free work for Google
And Google's convinced many webmasters to embed their recaptcha, so no matter where I go I have to give something up to Google. At least I felt better about it when I was helping OCR books.