So, recent brands of Google ReCAPTCHA sometimes deliberately feed you humanly impossible challenges to solve. Yes, indeed the complaints on the Internet are widespread, but today I tried an experiment to see if I could file any reasonable feedback with Google on the issue. My attempt has turned out in failure.
What did I do to try? Well, first, ReCAPTCHA has some feedback link you can click on. I clicked on that, and I got brought to a marketing website advertising the new ReCAPTCHA service to web developers. Not helpful from an end-user standpoint. But, anyways, I continued to play along with their game. Okay, if I can’t get end-user support, I can get developer support on their Google group for developers, right? Okay, treading further, I pretty quickly realize that the Google group for developers was setup by Google as an attempt to not have to do any work answering developer questions. Oh, come on, we’ve set up this community where all users can chat together, hopefully some more experienced users will already know the answer to the question, answer it for us, and we won’t have to do any work.
Treading further into that forum, I found some interesting evidence that I was not the only one. On the forum, there were some recent posts by clear end-users, rather than developers, asking about their difficulty in using ReCAPTCHA.
So, my summary of the experience:
- Google has virtually zero customer support. I can affirm that.
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Google sells their services to web developers and advertisers. Unfortunately, the other customer-facing services did not evolve.
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If you’re not paying, you’re not the customer, you are the product being sold.