[jjoonathan]

Yeah, I should break down my methodology for arriving at the "hellban" conclusion.

If I get a bunch of failures in a row, I'll first try the refresh button built into the captcha, and then re-solve a number of times. Then I'll try re-loading the page and re-solving, then I'll try in a different browser with cleared state and re-solving, then I'll try a different device and re-solving, and finally I'll try a different connection, device, and cleared browser state and re-solving.

I'll consider something a hellban if I get persistent failures across several different challenge types but switching to a clean connection+device+state results in immediate success with the captcha.

Look, I get it, they can't be too explicit with the errors or they tip their hand to the botters and effectively give them a "to-do" list. Still, the gaslighting is persistent enough that there's just no way it's marginally beneficial all the way through. At some point, everyone figures it out: bots, techies, and normies. My guess is that they figure it out in this order, from quickest to slowest: smart bots, techies, normies, dumb bots. I'm not calling normies dumb here, they just don't have much background knowledge about the inner workings of captchas, so it takes longer. By that point, they're so far past the typical number of captcha attempts that only the very dumbest of bots, those without heuristics to detect this sort of thing, are going to be fooled along with them. Surely having the captcha tip its hand at this point -- which only gives an advantage to the dumbest of bots, because the smart bots figured it out long ago -- is the right thing to do.

Re:CAPTCHA has no mercy on the normies, and I really think they could do a lot better.

[joveian]

One thing I've found (after others mentioned it here) is that Google seems to reward impatience when trying to solve captchas. Going faster and making more mistakes and not waiting for loading images seems to help convice the algorithm that you are human. This is rough on anyone who thinks they are being rejected for not being accurate enough.

OTOH, it is hard to figure out for sure what makes a difference. I use a proxy/VPN with a fixed IP address that only I use and Google eventually seems to have figured it out; I used to get the hard or impossible ones on Google Scholar at times but now never do. So possibly in my case they decided to stop giving them to me around when I changed strategies, but I suggest giving it a try at least.

[hedora]

I usually intentionally get a few wrong to poison their learning data set. It doesn’t seem to impact the number of things I have to click on to get through.

I’m not sure what they’re measuring, but I doubt it has much to do with image recognition performance.

[fxtentacle]

I just click stuff randomly and then hammer the submit button until the new images load. That seems to work even though I rarely tick the correct squares.

My new strategy is to just file support requests to any company using them, complaining that I did their test correctly but it still rejected me. My idea is quite simply to make reCaptcha unfeasibly expensive to use.

Why does the Deezer app installed on my desktop PC need a daily captcha?

That said, I use it myself on all of my companies' customer support forums to discourage people from sending me those pesky requests. In that sense, it's the new "please hold the line".

In any case, I'm glad that Google's motto is "don't be evil". That reassures me that using reCaptcha is morally acceptable ;)