My random tales:
One night, playing bunch of Halo, I got an Xbox 360 voice message. "Message to all recent players. Fukushima nuclear power plant just exploded. You should stock up on iodine tablets." (I almost sent back a message saying "thanks for your concern, but I'm in the Chernobyl fallout zone and I turned out just fine thank you")
Pluto photographs from New Horizons? Frigging NASA retweet. (Edit: Actually I think it was a retweet of someone making a Disney meme about Pluto the Dog)
Most recently, I got a random Discord message from a British YouTuber I follow saying "the Queen just died, please be respectful and stuff".
Well duh.
reCAPTCHA started out as a clever way to improve the quality of OCRing books for Distributed Proofreaders / Project Gutenberg. You know, giving to the community, improving access to public-domain texts. Then Google acquired them. Text CAPTCHAs got phased out. No more of that stuff, just computer vision rubbish to improve Google's own AI models and services.
If they had continued to depend on tasks that directly help community, Google would at least have had to constantly make sure the community's concerns are met. But if they only have to answer to themselves for the quality of the data and nobody else even gets to see it, well, of course it turned into yet another mildly neglected Google project.