I read a mildly funny anecdote on a group blog the other day, and I wanted to leave a comment. Typical netizen behavior. I think the comment would have been either welcome, helpful, or at least not actively nauseating to that blog’s existing community.

One problem: the blog’s comment section is “powered” by Disqus. I’ve avoided using Disqus until this point, on the general principle of limiting how many different corps I’m logged in with, but this time I decided to go for it.

Disqus’s parent company describes the “identity” part of their offerings like this:

Imagine if…

Every customer interaction felt like a conversation with an old friend.

Bearing that in mind, here’s the Disqus sign-up process:

• Step 1: Try signing in with Google, because as many ways as Google fucks over its users, it’s good – well, better than average at keeping malefactors away from people’s logins.
• Step 2: Because that apparently just autofilled my Gmail username and address, I now have to choose a password, and it’s not going to be the same password as my Google account because I’m not a complete idiot.
• Step 3: The CAPTCHA, because Disqus isn’t content collecting fees from site owners and has volunteered its end users to teach self-driving cars what a motorcycle looks like.
• Step 4: Go through a second grid of CAPTCHA images.
• Step 5: Try to go through a third grid, this time picking out tiles with cars… and it never ends, because new tiles keep replacing the ones I pick. Am I missing a car in the very background of one tile because it’s three pixels wide, or is the CAPTCHA broken?
• Step 6: Give up.
• Step 7. Wait and see how badly my Gmail account gets deluged with spam, now that I’ve given the address to a new company.

This rigamarole is allegedly in the name of “proving I’m a human,” but CAPTCHA has been proven ineffective against bots by at least two different studies. What it actually does, in practice, is cut down on user participation.

I’m tempted to believe that this repression is at least subconsciously the goal; some of our modern dystopia’s tech overlords have the attitude of “keep the little people in their place.” In a business built entirely around user engagement, though, it’s more likely to be simple self-sabotaging stupidity. Not that stupidity is any better from the netizen’s perspective…

And now I’m going to continue not commenting on any Disqus-infested site for however many years it takes me to forget this lesson.