Thibault Meunir writing on Cloudflare’s blog:

Based on our data, it takes a user on average 32 seconds to complete a CAPTCHA challenge. There are 4.6 billion global Internet users. We assume a typical Internet user sees approximately one CAPTCHA every 10 days.

This very simple back of the envelope math equates to somewhere in the order of 500 human years wasted every single day — just for us to prove our humanity.

They aren’t just doing napkin math, they’re also trying to fix things:

We want to get rid of CAPTCHAs completely. The idea is rather simple: a real human should be able to touch or look at their device to prove they are human, without revealing their identity. We want you to be able to prove that you are human without revealing which human you are! You may ask if this is even possible? And the answer is: Yes!

I held off on having a CAPTCHA on our site for as long as I could, but the spammers are relentless (did you know they’ll even click on email confirmations now?!) so I finally gave in.

I’d do darn near anything to be rid of ‘em again (any ideas?), but it seems the alternative that Cloudflare is pursuing requires hardware security keys. Interesting stuff, and definitely worth a read, but it’s all experimental for now and I don’t know if/when we’ll be able to put it in practice.