[jorvi]

Google's CAPTCHA is specifically engineered to gaslight you though. Often it will ask you to identify fire hydrants or bicycles, and despite selecting all of them (and it being easy to recognise them as they are fairly unique objects), it will still give you an error, and give you a new set of images to try again. If it is feeling really malevolent it will even give you a third round. Hell, it happens regularly on the second and especially the third try it will give you excruciatingly slowly crossfading images, and the last image routinely seems to need 2-4 clicks to finally make the object it wants you to identify go away.

Hcaptcha (Cloudflare's alternative) is an absolutely breeze by comparison, and it even allows you to pre-generate a bunch of tokens via an extension (PrivacyPass).

[guest12333555]

Ok, apart of the fact hackernews just made me fill in a captcha to register this one-time account (neverthelss, cudos HN, you are still better than the rest):

I do not understand Hcaptcha hype here. Since CloudFlare switched to Hcaptcha, as a VPN user, every time I run into a site that has CloudFlare / Hcaptcha, I can forget to pass that test. No matter how many times I try, CloudFlare still shows it all the time. It is so bad, so that now every time I see now Hcaptcha shown, I just close the site without even trying anymore. PrivacyPass :) - the biggest joke I seen on privacy - they that endorse it are either naive or have some other agenda.

These "free" zero-cost captchas for site owners are now in all places where a captca is not really needed. If CloudFlare, supper-dupper DOS solution relies on captchas, or if Google super-dupper search relies on captchas to get results, that demostrated how bad these companties really are at the main thing they do, and only want more data.

Even pirate stream sites ask now for captchas. It is so easy to integrate them, why not.

captchas, followed by 2-factor authentication with phone SMSs that we are forced to accept in all main life services slowly, combined with and laws to register phone SIM cards so they really know who we are, killed the web we know - people are being identified with hight quality.

We all rant about this here. It comes same in waves in HN all the time, but what can you do?

At least, if you own or manage a site or blog do not use: CloudFlare, Google, etc - no CDNs, no shared fonts.

[jorvi]

There might be something really particular about your setup that trips up Hcaptcha.

I run Firefox with a stringent profile config, Ublocker in medium mode (3rd party default deny), I don’t care about cookies, Cookiebro, LocalCDN, Canvasblocker, Smart Referrer, on PIA VPN, and I never have issues with Hcaptcha.

As far as Privacy Pass goes: their code is on GitHub and you can verify the checksums. Doesn’t give me a 100% guarantee but it’s good enough for me.

[thinkharderdev]

I hate CAPTCHAs as much as the next person, just pointing out the it is a service that Google provides and no site is required to implement it. So if you don't like CAPTCHAs then your beef is with site owners.

[pmachinery]

The only good thing about hcaptcha - what's better than one page of images? - is it doesn't seem to care what you click, but then neither does Google if you're using Chrome.