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by dang
26 days ago
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We use captchas to cut down on bots and crawlers. They don't work as well as they used to but they at least alter the economics somewhat, or so I tell myself. Our reason for this is to try to make HN as good as possible for its real users. |
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The reason captchas bother me so much is they always seem to happen in the course of legitimate activities. Like I had one when trying to make a charity donation, or ordering something - I have no idea why it would be hard to distinguish such traffic as legitimate, I’m convinced it’s because I’m using a nonstandard browser, not allowing cookies, etc.
If I was trying an automation or to bulk download something or whatever, I’d take the captcha as an interesting professional challenge. When I’m trying to use someone’s services or pay them money, it’s just ridiculous friction and I generally abandon any transaction that makes me do a captcha.
Incidentally I have scraped HN and never encountered any problems, since you have an api for it