[rickboyce]

For me this effect is significantly compounded by not being from the US / North America. This has come up on HN before (e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25226805 ) but it still strikes me as so odd that you need quite a bit of USA cultural / vernacular knowledge to navigate the internet anywhere in the world (or at least English speaking sites?). What a strange view into another country to see each day!

[OJFord]

I was going to vehemently agree and start ranting, but I see you've linked a submission that already has enough of me ranting! Ha. I'll only add that sometimes it annoys me so much I want to create my own 'Britcha' out of spite.

Perhaps if I ever run some really popular site I shall: 'select all pubs', 'arrange the squares in order of social class', 'type the word that describes an ordered collection of people waiting for something'.

[johnsolo1701]

Would totally make sense - when visiting .co.uk sites!

[OJFord]

No it wouldn't. Just like American sites, there are very many .co.uk sites that (intentionally) serve a world audience.

Different language & currency support is fairly common, and where not present it's usually because other markets aren't deliberately served. I18n/l10n ought to extend to captcha too.

[prox]

Maybe chachacaptcha, with only fun puzzles to solve. Since bots don’t have humor (yet)

[johnsolo1701]

Honest question - how can you tell the difference between "English speaking sites" and "American sites"? Since English is currently the common international language, when an American creates a site or service for a domestic audience, anyone around the world can still come visit and read it. But how does one know if a service is meant for a domestic audience?

We've all seen services launched by American companies, with American employees, American VC money, that only work within the US, and are only offered in English. We've also all seen how these companies get criticized by people around the world that the service doesn't work in their country and their language. From the American perspective it seems like the rest of the world feels they are automatically entitled to services created here. Even if the stated plan is to eventually roll out to the rest of the world.

This behavior is stunningly obvious when a Chinese or Indian company launches an interesting new product or service for a domestic audience. In those cases, it's hard to find people upset that the service only works domestically or doesn't work in their language. This is because those people aren't falling into the logical fallacy of "American = English = International language = International product".

As a good faith question - if you were an American, how would you create a site or service for a domestic audience without insulting the rest of the world?

p.s. This is a side question non related to this article specifically - obviously google is an international product.

[rickboyce]

>As a good faith question - if you were an American, how would you create a site or service for a domestic audience without insulting the rest of the world?

First I would say that I don't think I've been, or particularly seen others, be offended by sites that are clearly targeted at a US/North American audience while still being more widely accessible. Usually I am happy that being an English speaker gets me access to a wider set of things on the internet than would otherwise be specifically targeted for where I live. I'd say this is fairly true up until the scale of a company with international presence and operations.

Yes there is going to be some vocal minority who behave in an entitled manner and loudly complain that something didn't meet their personal expectations, but this is a small minority and not representative of the wider English-using-international audience.

If a site is open and upfront about what they are doing then I wouldn't have any issue. Examples might be using geolocation to restrict access or just having some note making clear that 'this service is for X, use it elsewhere at your own risk'.

A good example of this is the range of approaches different sites have taken to GDPR compliance (or that awful cookie law compliance!) following its implementation by the EU and the non-EU countries that have adopted it.

Some non-EU sites (possibly based in the US but also plenty of others elsewhere) have used geolocation to restrict access from the EU, others have implemented those consent banners, others have done nothing. However I don't think it is reasonable to blame a company doing any of these, ultimately we are benefitting from the protections the new law provides - if we don't like the wider implications of that then we need to take that up with our lawmakers, not a foreign company located somewhere with their own set of data protection laws.

The change for me occurs when a company is an international entity. I realise this is a bit of a grey line as to what defines this, but hopefully we'd all agree that FAANG meets this definition. When you're actively engaged with international markets and generating significant revenue in countries around the world I think it is a reasonable expectation that you either: a) make services culturally and linguistically localised; or b) more carefully target a service to some specific regions.

TLDR - at a small scale, if you are open & clear about your intentions I don't think you need to worry about 'insulting the rest of the world' - if you get significant traction in another country you should probably open a dialogue with that user base to understand their views.

[stephen_g]

Yeah, this annoys me so much. Some just grate (we don’t have ‘crosswalks’ here, we have ‘pedestrian crossings’) but for some things I literally just don’t really know what they look like in the US and have to just guess!

[jjoonathan]

True, but the questions are still very poorly posed even if you are from the US. Does a corner of a wheel count as a car? Is the square box containing a traffic light a traffic light? What about the horizontal pole on which it is suspended? What about the vertical pole holding up the horizontal pole? If there is one in the distance, does that count?

You have to play a game of guessing what other people will guess, and yeah, if you aren't from the US that's a huge handicap, if you aren't neurotypical that's a huge handicap, if you have bad luck that day that's a huge handicap. Google doesn't give a shit, the people who put the captcha in place don't give a shit, you just have to deal with the little Kafka nightmare they dump you in and hope it doesn't lock you out of something critical.

[scrollaway]

With all the legitimate criticism of Captchas, this is really a made up one. It doesn't matter. You can get some stuff wrong and still pass, and you can skip/retry if the picture is not clear too.

Captchas aren't a "score 100 percent at this minigame" thing, they're more of a "loosely follow these instructions while I watch your cursor and analyze your results to figure out if you're a human or a selenium instance."

[jlokier]

Maybe you can get some stuff wrong and still pass.

But if someone has been stuck for 20 minutes on this game, through 30 different screens of it, and not passed yet, you can surely understand why they may think the reason is they are getting some edge-case stuff "wrong" and the machine is very picky, so they have to figure out the secret rules needed to pass.

I did try once for 20 minutes to see if tenacity would win, until I gave up because it still hadn't let me pass. I'm pretty sure that my error rate was very low, if not zero.

I'm guessing those times when I've been unable to get past a Captcha were due to the IP address I was connecting from, but it's pretty abusive of a site to tell someone it will let them in if they solve a simple test correctly, and then repeatedly show a new version of the test, never letting them in and never telling them no either. Cloudflare and Google have been bad for this.

[scrollaway]

The fact you'd get stuck for any length of time on it sounds like one of those "legitimate criticisms" i was talking about, that has nothing to do with whether a wheel counts as a car.

[Zababa]

I was going to say exactly the same thing. Some things are really confusion when you're not from the US. I think it's a problem with internet in general, as many people speaks english and thus people from the USA think everyone is from here.

[johnsolo1701]

Just to share the American perspective, it feels like this: Many people speak English, and thus it is difficult/impossible for people from outside the US to discern the difference between domestic and international services. (Not saying Google is a domestic service obviously.) Through historical chance, we don't have the luxury and benefits of a native language like many of you reading this right now.

[stephen_g]

That is one reason I very strongly believe that US-only top level domains like .edu, .gov and .mil should be phased out and replaced with *.us TLDs. Then, US based colleges would be under .edu.us, just like e.g. Australian ones are under edu.au, and US-specific businesses could use .com.us domains to indicate this.

But that seems quite tangential to the point that recapcha, being deployed internationally, should be much more effectively culturally internationalised! Just having a language isn’t enough - there are big cultural differences between Spain and Mexico despite both speaking Spanish, and Brazil and Portugal despite both speaking Portuguese, for instance.

[Zababa]

I don't really understand what you mean by this. Do you have any example? Is it something like not knowing if an online store is international or domestic? Because in that case we face the same issue, when I see a store in English I'm not sure it'll ship to Europe, and often doesn't.

[cpeterso]

Seems like CAPTCHAs shown to users outside the UA should show local road images because locals know best how to identify objects on their roads. Perhaps Google is prioritizing the autonomous vehicle market in the US for now.