this post was submitted on 19 Jul 2024
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When it comes to social phobia, I think that this is a fair point - asking someone to guarantee you might trigger it in a way that captcha wouldn't. However, as I mentioned in another comment, this sort of system would work the best for situations where users interact actively with a platform, to prevent spam, and I think that people with social phobia would already tend to avoid those.
Another counter-measure would be groups guaranteeing each other, instead of individuals; that's what the Fediseer does. Then the guarantee boils down to "group A trusts group B to not allow botters", but which criteria each group uses to accept/deny individuals is up to the group.
Now, when it comes to depression, I think that it's more complicated - as it would depend on implementation, and captcha is already a problem for depressive people, since it already offers enough resistance against users that depressive people might say "...fuck it, I tried this shit twice, too much effort". And this will likely get worse with the progression of the arms race between botters and captcha systems.
Speaking as someone who suffers from both conditions, captchas are not a significantly worse problem for depressed people than for others—they're impersonal, and while irritating, they set a fairly low bar for effort. Dealing with machines being machines is comparatively easy if you're able to make the effort to fill out the join-up form at all.
Asking someone for something, on the other hand, is high-effort for many depressed people for a couple of reasons:
It requires you to feel worthy of help, because if you're certain you're going to be refused, why bother trying? Depression and low self-worth tend to go hand in hand.
It requires you to risk refusal. Even if the other person's reason for refusing is neutral ("I no longer do that for anyone," for example), it can feed back into the depression and make it worse. Since this can hurt one hell of a lot, you learn not to ask.
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It's true that some people won't be able to scrape together enough interest or effort to pass even the captcha, but this alternative is much worse.
The issue with the group network version is that a few large corporations would end up taking it over. Again.