I've lived my whole life in the US and have about 20/20 vision (used to be slightly better than 20/15), and I'd estimate my reCaptcha pass rate around 20%.
The puzzles are just badly done, it's not even a vision or knowledge thing.
Yeah. The puzzles are terrible now, and I have a strong suspicion that they're no longer testing to see if you behave like another human, but instead testing you to see if you act like their own machine vision bot.
Honestly, you're kind of insulting the intelligence of most people without a US cultural background.
Nobody is claiming it's perfect. But notice how nobody here is analyzing why people use ReCaptcha in the first place nor providing alternatives.
If you knew nothing of ReCaptcha and only read these comments, you'd wonder if it was a gag website operators put on their website for self-amusement, which is basically how I looked at homework as a kid. But I feel like this discussion is a bit more one-sided than I expected on HN, a place where I would've thought more people had experience running a website and how immediately effective ReCaptcha was the second you added a <textarea>.
Once again, all trails lead back to you providing some alternative solutions instead of the empty catharsis of coming up with downsides to something in an internet comment.
Here's one of my own: Isn't it annoying that spambots show up the second I launch a website? Ugh! Well, got that out of the way. Now I need a solution.
What's yours?
Taxis are a different color everywhere, there's no "standard," even NYC has green taxis ("Boro Taxis"). Yellow is a popular color, because it stands out, but I've taken taxis every color of the rainbow (well, maybe not pink or purple), each area or company is different.
In my neighborhood two companies operate taxis, one has a fleet of red taxis and another has a fleet of blue taxis. From my observation, black is probably the second most common taxi color.
You identify a taxi by it's markings, not it's color.
I mean you tell me to check the markings, but you know in those captchas you can't see any markings because most things look like a blurry blob.
