We were mad about bloated, unnecessarily large web pages taking 3 seconds to load. Now, it takes 8 seconds to first pass a "checking if you're a bot" page or worse - making you click on pictures of crosswalks.

meanwhile agents have been able to pass these captchas for a while now, so it's unclear what the point of them now is. It's like they want to keep out the dumb bots, but any agent with reasonable intelligence can come in.

Yes, the bot detection wait IS starting to get out of hand. As for solving a puzzle, I just exit the page and move on with my day.

> crosswalks

And their a11y/internationalisation is horrid.

We have pedestrian crossings, not crosswalks. We don't have fire hydrants (instead a different solution). We don't have yellow schoolbuses. Our traffic lights look different (and have different names in different cultures). And those examples are just the obvious problems with some captchas. Usually there are more subtle problems with verification UIs.

This is the real hidden cost of the bots. I absolutely loathe the human verification hoops I have to jump through now, more than anything else mentioned in this thread.

yesterday I visited a page with TWO! captchas side by side. When I got through the second one the first one had expired...

Reddit blocks anonymous mobile web traffic behind a capcha now.

One way to look at this is that the internet is healing. Platforms are closing themselves off to growth and scabbing over.