Think from the publisher side of view. You want to have an easy way to monetize content, and ads used to work well, but now you get very little or nothing from ads because most impressions and clicks are made by bots.
So instead of adding a "paywall" to see the content, you add a "captcha" and the users will be able to see the content for free along with some unobtrusive text ads.
I think it's already proven that users rather solve a "captcha" then use their credit card to gain access.
As it happened, that was only true for a minority of visitors. Many people would happily punch in an answer to recaptcha v1 to read the article one of their friends sent them, and might not have even known it was to increase the legitimacy of ad clicks.
Any publisher with any sense at all knows that annoying users will simply drive them away. Then there will be no audience at all, except perhaps bots which can solve captchas.
I mean, that's what a pay wall is isn't it? think of all things people do on HN to go around those. Solving a captcha is probably worse because it's not annoying enough to go around so you actually just have to do it, but now it's more likely a legitimate user.
Doesn't Google's current version of reCaptcha work mostly invisible? I am confident that they use a similar system atm to detect bots. I know the "checkmark" version used e.g. mouse movement to detect humans.
Iff the answer to paywalls (and not site access) is CAPTCHA, then I would have been game. Problem is that I'm still not going to disable uBlock due to the poor practices of ad companies destroying web usability.
