Spam was terrible before CAPTCHA. Every forum software had a half dozen different anti-spam plugins that only supported that specific release and were incapable of catching anything novel, so you still needed a team of moderators covering every time zone to handle all the crap that made it past those filters. Unmoderated forums turned into bots endlessly replying to each other in a matter of days.
CAPTCHA did a ton to reduce the amount of bots successfully signing up, and it took years for spammers to adapt. Even now, adding a simple captcha to your sign-up page remains the single most effective anti-spam measure you can take.
Captchas turning into a tool to make users create free training data for self-driving AI sucks, but capitalism is gonna capitalism. The captcha variant that was used to help digitize old books was pretty cool.
Spam was terrible before CAPTCHA. Every forum software had a half dozen different anti-spam plugins that only supported that specific release and were incapable of catching anything novel, so you still needed a team of moderators covering every time zone to handle all the crap that made it past those filters. Unmoderated forums turned into bots endlessly replying to each other in a matter of days.
CAPTCHA did a ton to reduce the amount of bots successfully signing up, and it took years for spammers to adapt. Even now, adding a simple captcha to your sign-up page remains the single most effective anti-spam measure you can take.
Captchas turning into a tool to make users create free training data for self-driving AI sucks, but capitalism is gonna capitalism. The captcha variant that was used to help digitize old books was pretty cool.