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I strongly have the impression that with things like the puzzles you bring up is that an overwhelmingly large percentage of internet users have been conditioned to receive “compressed” information as quickly and massively as possible.Exactly.. Users are more prone to consume rather than create, because the latter requires more energy than the former. And when the object of consumption (be it a book, a piece of art, or some piece of online content) needs to be deciphered... well, decipherment is part of creation, where the audience is co-creating with the author. This causes an enormous struggle to keep a prolonged attention span going on single subject items and people rather hop from one topic to the other purely out of conditioning.And when these people hop across topics, they're very likely to forget about the previous ones. Meanwhile, co-created content (such as the kinds of puzzles I used to try and participate in deciphering, or even books where the epistemological (meta-cognition) is part of the book) is likely to accompany the person for life, both as knowledge and as social experience.It also feels like the above causes people in general to lose interest in complicated matters because there is no instant gratification nor a grand “prize” at the conclusion if they would participate.There was a time when the factor of good surprise used to be one of such prizes, the satisfaction of having something suddenly clicking so perfectly before one's eyes and/or inside one's mind, as if two minds, the author's and the audience's, suddenly got connected at distance. Well, maybe it's a subjective perception of mine, maybe it's just a me thing, I dunno, but it felt like people also had a similar feeling of "satisfaction out of co-creation" back in Orkut and Geocities times.

It's quite mournsome to see how, nowadays, prize and gratification became synonyms for monetary value (i.e. "how much $$$ do I receive by engaging with this book/art/puzzle/post that requires me to divert some of my time to it?"), worthiness measured in terms of money, and the idea that "time is money" became further consolidated in an increasingly corporative Web.