​​🤖 reCAPTCHA
the pain-in-the-ass contribution to culture

If you've been online long enough, you probably have come across a reCAPTCHA. Remember those distorted words you had to figure out to prove to a computer that you're not one of them? Yea, those.

CAPTCHA is an acronym for "completely automated public Turing test to tell computers and humans apart." Even if you knew what it stands for, there's a good chance you didn't know what you were actually doing when typing those annoyingly malformed words...

Every time you typed a distorted pain-in-the-ass captcha, you were contributing to digitising a book — or magazine or some publication! I know, it's 🤯 — and it ranged from The New York Times' archive of over 100 years to all the books in Google's library.

I learned that listening to Luis von Ahn explaining creating reCAPTCHA & Duolingo. It's a fantastic story — at least, it made me feel less bad about wasting my time on captcha!

🦅 @perspectiveix