$8/month (or other small charges) can solve a lot of problems.
Note that some of the early CAPTCHA algorithms solved two problems at once—both distinguishing bots from humans, and helping improve OCR technology by harnessing human vision. (I’m not sure exactly how it worked—either you were voting on the interpretation of an image of some text, or you were training a neural network).
Such dual-use CAPTCHA seems worthwhile, if it helps crowdsource solving some other worthwhile problem (better OCR does seem worthwhile).
$8/month (or other small charges) can solve a lot of problems.
Note that some of the early CAPTCHA algorithms solved two problems at once—both distinguishing bots from humans, and helping improve OCR technology by harnessing human vision. (I’m not sure exactly how it worked—either you were voting on the interpretation of an image of some text, or you were training a neural network).
Such dual-use CAPTCHA seems worthwhile, if it helps crowdsource solving some other worthwhile problem (better OCR does seem worthwhile).