What the other commenter said and also accessibility issues, aand overall this is a problem which shouldn't face the end user at all. Just browsing has become just a nuisance after a nuisance nowadays. Just like cookie modals not adhering to browser settings or hiding the reject all behind extra steps.

Sorry, I assumed this was already common knowledge. There's another thread fork from a comment.

Tl;dr they're not good at their purpose and cause unneeded annoyance to users.

Yeah would be sick if LLMs and bots just disappeared overnight

Captchas ain't stopping them anyway

i meant other types of captchas as well, but yes, cloudflare is fairly configurable. I also know other captchas can be more aggressive. And of course captchas can also block or harass "high privacy" configuration browsers and clients, and there's also the strategy of infinite delay, where a captcha is never quite sure you're really a human, so you have to work through 12 phases of it only to have to do the exact same thing again the next time you're on the site. Recaptcha V3 with its "automatic" background captcha is also in a surprising amount of places you'd never know about unless you're infected with some kind of The-Mainstream-Internet-Hates-You disease. Captchas discriminating against poor countries isn't some big secret though, as far as I'm aware it's fairly well known.

And the cloudflare ones are broken as fuck. It varies but I often just can't pass them. Answer it, wheel goes round and then back to having to tick it and start again. Beep boop.

If I see a cloudflare check I often just don't bother loading the site at all.

Except that bots already have a higher pass rate than humans, so the captcha isn’t even good at preventing bots.

Yeah cloudflare gets a similar reaction as a paywall. Fuck this site, I'll go somewhere else

The obstacles serve a specific purpose though. Do you believe this purpose is unimportant?

Because they are anti-vpn and thus anti-privacy.

it's about time someone fuckin did it.

it's a shame it's Russia though.

Idk man, I've seen hundreds of examples showcasing how they significantly reduce bot traffic. The point isn't to make it impossible for a bot to get past it, it's to make it so expensive per request that it's not worth it.

I'm not saying the effect on bot traffic is none

What are you even talking about?

cloudflare is a symptom of the corporatization of the internet.

they goals are counter to the goals of the internet to be a distributed repository of communities and information.

CF not only unifies all the communications through their services, which can cause worldwide outages (happens literally every year), but collects and tracks users across all other network requests.

CF is anti-privacy and pro-corporate interests.

That clarifies it, thanks