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Goodbye (Crummy) CAPTCHAs. Hello Ad Dollars?

mediamemo.allthingsd.com

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Re: Goodbye (Crummy) CAPTCHAs. Hello Ad Dollars?

#51

Post by photon_off »

Normally, I refrain from writing such bad things about start-ups and people's ideas, unless there is something really awful about it. In this case, it's obvious how terrible this service is, both in terms of how it treats the user (who wants to do you a favor by signing up) as a cow to be milked, and how the implementation of it does very little to solve the actual problem of spam. It's just a greedy and short-sighted idea. I won't write any more about how stupid it is.

What I will note is that it is somewhat inspiring to see that an idea like this can get off the ground. I haven't dug into the details of "Solve Media", but I assume that some people poured a sum of money into this. Maybe there's a sucker born every minute, or maybe confidence in anything internet-related is just that high. Hopefully, both things are true, and I think that's a good thing. I'm not advocating taking suckers' money, but rather believing the following: If your idea is anything better than this, which it likely is, you have a shot at it.

Re: Goodbye (Crummy) CAPTCHAs. Hello Ad Dollars?

#52

Post by mike-cardwell »

jfager wrote: post #49
there wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ok, but how many comments are you losing because people don't want to fill out a captcha? i've used defensio.com for filtering comments on my site with no captcha and rarely ever get a false positive or negative. false negatives are easy to spot, and users can manually override false positives by supplying an email address to get a confirmation link (which gets fed back to defensio as a false positive once clicked).

It's a tradeoff, sure. In my case, I'm perfectly happy to trade a few comments from people who don't want to deal with a captcha for never having to manually deal with spam. YMMV.

There are better ways of reducing comment spam to near zero without resorting to captchas. Here's how I did it:

https://secure.grepular.com/Blocking_Comment_Spam_Using_ModS...

It's still working now.

Re: Goodbye (Crummy) CAPTCHAs. Hello Ad Dollars?

#53

Post by mikemol »

photon_off wrote: post #51

Normally, I refrain from writing such bad things about start-ups and people's ideas, unless there is something really awful about it. In this case, it's obvious how terrible this service is, both in terms of how it treats the user (who wants to do you a favor by signing up) as a cow to be milked, and how the implementation of it does very little to solve the actual problem of spam. It's just a greedy and short-sighte…

Users creating and using free accounts have costs associated with them. Those costs need to be met in order for the service to continue, either by tying a revenue model to the users directly, via charity, or by subsidizing their use of your resources by using something they contribute, such as content.

Selling user content is not a stable net in proportion to user use of the site; you don't know that the content will continue to sell at a rate keeping pace with user-incurred costs.

Charity is also not a stable net in proportion to user use of the site; nothing directly and reliably ties charity income to user-incurred cost, and nothing can--it's charity.

The only way to meet proportionate cost incurred by user use is by tying a proportionate revenue to user use. Even if you don't charge a user to use the service, even if you only ask that they fill out a text box to use the site, just as they might with reCAPTCHa, it suddenly becomes 'milking the user'.

Sadly, users no longer merely expect services to be free for them, they get offended if the service provider derives any money at all for their activity. (I think I sort of understand the mentality--"Why are they getting money for my work, when I'm not?"--but that logic doesn't hold up if no money was changing hands while they did the work anyway.)

You're also rather vague about what "the actual problem of spam" is. What strikes you as a mere symptom, and what strikes you as a cause? Yes, these peoples' particular implementation of challenge-response is pretty poor. Is that what you were specifically referring to, or did you have something else in mind?

Re: Goodbye (Crummy) CAPTCHAs. Hello Ad Dollars?

#54

Post by mseebach »

olegk wrote: post #44
mseebach wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please read my post. Specifically the second paragraph where exactly this issue is addressed.

Still doesn't make sense. If you display 10 random animals (or shapes), and ask a user to pick the right one, a dumb spam script would have a 10% success rate. If you display one image of an animal and give 10 possible answers, a dumb spam script would have a 10% success rate.

So if I have a library of 10s of thousands of images of animals, shapes, things etc. that are all easily recognisable to English speakers -- e.g. cat, dog, house, drum, road, tree, book, horse -- and ask them to write in what is it, AND I constantly update that library and retire pictures that's been used many time -- what is your dumb script's success rate?

What if I combine three pictures in each challenge - e.g. "cat house triangle"?

Re: Goodbye (Crummy) CAPTCHAs. Hello Ad Dollars?

#55

Post by mseebach »

mike-cardwell wrote: post #52
jfager wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a tradeoff, sure. In my case, I'm perfectly happy to trade a few comments from people who don't want to deal with a captcha for never having to manually deal with spam. YMMV.

There are better ways of reducing comment spam to near zero without resorting to captchas. Here's how I did it: https://secure.grepular.com/Blocking_Comment_Spam_Using_ModS... It's still working now.

That's great, pretty much any home-rolled CAPTCHA will perform great, simply because it's not worthwhile for spammers to design an attack. If that, however, was the default anti-spam mechanism on, say, wordpress installs, it'd be automated against in minutes.

Re: Goodbye (Crummy) CAPTCHAs. Hello Ad Dollars?

#56

Post by olegk »

mseebach wrote: post #54
olegk wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Still doesn't make sense. If you display 10 random animals (or shapes), and ask a user to pick the right one, a dumb spam script would have a 10% success rate. If you display one image of an animal and give 10 possible answers, a dumb spam script would have a 10% success rate.

So if I have a library of 10s of thousands of images of animals, shapes, things etc. that are all easily recognisable to English speakers -- e.g. cat, dog, house, drum, road, tree, book, horse -- and ask them to write in what is it, AND I constantly update that library and retire pictures that's been used many time -- what is your dumb script's success rate? What if I combine three pictures in each challenge - e.g. "…

My spam script would always answer "cat", so among 8 options (cat, dog, house, drum, road, tree, book, horse), I'd get a 12.5% success rate.

Plus you constantly have to update your image library, which a huge pain.

Also, recognizing 10,000 images will take me around one day and less than $1000 with Amazon turk, thus giving me a perfect 100% success rate. After that you would have to completely renew your image database.

Re: Goodbye (Crummy) CAPTCHAs. Hello Ad Dollars?

#58

Post by metageek »

mikeknoop wrote: post #34

How about this for a CAPTCHA, a video ad unit where the questions are akin to those old SCENEIT questions? Ie, what color shirt was the man pumping gas wearing? Bonus points if you tell the user the question after the video so they have to re-watch.

I hate wasting my time on videos even when they're about things I'm interested in; I'm not going to use a service that forces me to watch one I'm not interested in.

Re: Goodbye (Crummy) CAPTCHAs. Hello Ad Dollars?

#59

Post by jchonphoenix »

il wrote: post #36
jchonphoenix wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know the founders of reCaptcha. This is easier to prevent than you think. Its also quite rare.

Heh, I know people who are working on breaking reCaptcha. Maybe they should get together and learn from each other. If you're saying that it's possible to prevent manual, outsourced captcha solving, I would have to strongly disagree. It's similar to the futility of DRM as an antipiracy measure. As long as I can see the captcha, I can pay someone in another country to solve it for me. I will agree that it's rare- but…

I'm not saying that its possible to do it in an automated way. I'm just saying that tools exist to create red flags that would make thing easily verified by a human. They have ways in which they deal with these things. All I'm saying is so far, its been working for them.

Re: Goodbye (Crummy) CAPTCHAs. Hello Ad Dollars?

#60

Post by mike-cardwell »

mseebach wrote: post #55
mike-cardwell wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are better ways of reducing comment spam to near zero without resorting to captchas. Here's how I did it: https://secure.grepular.com/Blocking_Comment_Spam_Using_ModS... It's still working now.

That's great, pretty much any home-rolled CAPTCHA will perform great, simply because it's not worthwhile for spammers to design an attack. If that, however, was the default anti-spam mechanism on, say, wordpress installs, it'd be automated against in minutes.

Definitely. If more people rolled their own, the spammers would be screwed.
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