When I have the time (or have failed ten bloody CAPTCHA's in a row), I sometimes shoot out emails to whatever website or service I am trying to use, to advocate for the removal of reCAPTCHA. Unfortunately, as long as only a few people are complaining though, a lot of websites will continue to paste in Google code blocks willy-nilly.
I came to the same conclusion 2 weeks ago. Nowadays, I have to solve the captcha 15-20 times before it lets me in. So I have started purposefully making wrong answers-road instead of car, sky instead of cross walks etc. If self driving cars end up crashing, I may have contributed to it.
Similar thing happened with YouTube too. They would always show me the same ad over and over. Even if I skip, I would get that ad multiple times in the same video. It was a political ad and it starts with one guy saying how he can't get treatment because of some medicare changes. I got so annoyed I wanted to punch the guy talking in the ad whenever I hear him.
Aren't you doing anything weird with your cookies? For me recaptcha is almost always solvable from the first try. Regarding Youtube, usually reloading the page 2-3 times allows me to skip ads, but this trick doesn't work with all videos.
Recaptcha use many kind of informations, among those is your IP address. If you are browsing through a VPN for example it may see that you are not browsing from a home IP but from a datacenter. In that case I think it assumes that you're a bot and makes it much harder to pass.
I have my Firefox set to clear cookies on exit, with NoScript and PrivacyBadger addons. Also has ad/tracking blocking at router. Not sure if any of these can trigger the above behavior. One thing to point out is I was using the same setup in a different region before and never experienced this. Only started getting it after I moved to my current location and got a new ISP. I was never using VPN when I get this captcha issue.
Regarding YouTube, forgot to mention. I was getting that ad problem with Chromecast. I cast a lot of videos with the YouTube Android app. Whenever I get that ad, I would click on the skip ad button in app (which itself takes 2-3 tries sometimes). Then 2 or 3 minutes later, it would show the same ad. After I moved to my current location, I haven't experienced this behavior yet.
I'm not doing anything weird with my cookies, I'm just refusing most of them, and preventing webpages from accessing the rest (unless I'm on the page that made those cookies), as well as hiding some of the personally identifying information my browser sends out.
Really it should be the default, and in fact most webpages have no issue respecting those settings, google's recaptcha is about the only thing that actively refuses to cooperate.
