What Would Bill Gates Do?

[steepholm]

They’re turning kids into slaves just to make cheaper sneakers.
But what’s the real cost?
‘Cause the sneakers don’t seem that much cheaper. (The Flight of the Conchords)

I mentioned recently that spam had forced me to put CAPTCHA on anonymous comments. Both dorianegray and owlfish reported that doing this hadn't stemmed the spamflow for them, and I've got to say

Comments

[strange_complex]

On the other other hand, deleting all those spam comments is wasting your time, which also has an economic value. If you'd like to channel some of your salary towards supporting people in developing countries, there are more constructive (and less annoying!) ways to do it.

[steepholm]

This is very true! In fact I don't really need to delete them. They can sit happily in my gmail folder (always expanding, like the universe) and on the LJ servers (they don't seem to care), and no one's worse off. But I do delete them, of course.

[strange_complex]

Yes, so do I. I don't get very many, because I have banned anonymous commenting (though I did it more to deter trolls than spammers), but it still feels untidy to leave them undeleted on my journal.

[houseboatonstyx]

But what about wasting the time of legitimate readers who would like to be making constructive comments, who are instead having to spend their spoons guessing at ambiguous captchas?

[nightspore]

Yeah but captcha/recaptcha's are social goods, since they help digitize hard to search texts.

[houseboatonstyx]

But is that the kind that LJ actually offers? Some of the distorted words look like real scan faults, but others look like they're designed to be ambiguous.