They currently have a monopoly on STR listings - so they don't really need to care about user experience.
This is what you end up with.
They’re likely also trying to push users to their app.
It seems like it's product managers justifying their investment in the native applications in a lot of cases.
Anyway the most well known example is probably YT which slowly reduced over time the functionality of their Web version for mobile, and also put things in to make it more annoying, too.
"If everybody else pushes users to their app over web, there must be good reasons to do it, we should too."
Expecting companies to rationally analyzed whether that is actually the case, is, well, expecting too much of companies.
It can be a problem even for Google Captcha.
Like:
- Taxies are not yellow in all countries
- Fire hydrants like that aren't a thing in many countries either (e.g. in Germany they are below a small hatch in the ground)
- US School Busses
- Even Street Signs can look and be placed very different.
- What is recognized as a shop/restaurant and similar based on the style of the sign board
But that is typical SV: Solving problems for the US from a US perspective and assuming it works in most countries.
But most countries are _not_ like the US.
The idea that stuck with me from it is that we’ve been spoiled as devs by the early low hanging fruit version of the internet. The MVPs were enough better than non-digital incumbents that we could just export california everywhere.
Wut? Have you actually ever met a person who can't? I always suspected the electoral majority is not particularly bright (which sort of contradicts the idea of near-100 being an average IQ nevertheless) but if this is "unusually smart" then things feel really creepy.
And it makes sense.
Statistically, an IQ of 100 is the population median, meaning, assuming a Gaussian repartition (which it usually is for human traits), that's about 10% of people scoring around 80 or lower.
To give an idea of what level of intelligence this means, we can wonder what that kind of people cannot do?
In the US, the military don't do a systematic IQ test for recruitment, but when they did one, it was deemed illegal to induct any one if they possessed an IQ less than or equal to 81.
That means 1 person out of 10 is not intelligent enough to be in the lowest rank in the army.
It's not far fetched to think of the possibility that some functioning members of society are not capable of solving mental problems most humanity think are trivial.
In fact, that are also trivial for AI, although we may all end up to fall into that basket one day or the other.
One of the brightest, quickest witted people I know experiences significant dyslexia and dyscalculia. She would fail at this and it would make her quietly angry at you for making her go through it.
I also know someone with a vision disorder who would struggle.
Hell, when I am tired, I would have to close one eye to pass -- I have this issue with quite a lot of captchas, and I am not legally vision-impaired. And I would be angry at the developer for making me struggle.
Furthermore, I think in a world with an ageing population it might be worth considering that puzzles like this are a bit like early dementia tests. It's worth thinking what data gets collected when the world is asked to perform brainteasers to gain access to essential functions.
I have met a few, yes, including people who are intellectually limited (colloquially called "dumb"), people who were born or acquired mental handicaps, people who are suffering most likely suffering from dyscalculia (dyslexia for arithmetic/numbers). E.g. we think my grandma might have had a milder form of the latter, as she had a lot of trouble adding up numbers in particular, which would have made this CAPTCHA very hard for her - but not impossible. And a friend of my mom has Turner syndrome, which is linked to dyscalculia, and she is indeed very bad at basic math.
Among people, who aren't straight up unable due to handicaps, who couldn't solve them? It seems easy enough that mostly anyone could.
They are quite common problems with a wide spectrum of severity.
Back when you could take your car to a local garage, your car would very likely be repaired by a very clever person who was dyslexic (even dyscalculate) because as a career, men in particular who struggled with written language (or even modestly complex maths -- differential gear yes, differential equation no) could do it and thrive at it.
Should that person be treated as handicapped if they need to fill in a form? Or should forms not be designed to make people waste their time with puzzles or kafkaesque processes of any kind?
Summing dice together is not the only ability you need to solve this puzzle.
It's not the totality of what is being tested.
In other words, it's instructive to consider why a computer struggles to solve it with this particular photographic presentation, and why a person might.
“If you cannot lift 100 lbs over your head, should you be operating a fork lift?”
There was (probably) a point in history where AirBnB existed to make things easier. Now I'm pretty sure it's just there to make money.
Regardless of the answer to that, it focuses on the wrong problem.
The problem is the user-hostile concept of captchas in the first place. Imagine going to a brick and mortar store (or travel agency) and being forced to solve some ridiculous puzzle to be allowed inside to do a transaction.
It's not ok in physical life, it's not ok on a commerce website.
Incidentally, how old are you, and do you have any involvement with IT hiring?
Coming back to the topic, it’s interesting how this IQ cliff seems to exclusively affect ICs in IT, while somehow spares all of the middle and upper management, that all seems to be on top of their compensation game as they gracefully age ever so upwards in titles.
Certainly, when I read this I immediately thought of three.
These CAPTCHAs require more thought than the platform otherwise does, therefore it will gate some people from using the platform.
Lots of CS grads who went immediately to a high-paid CS positions have no clue how to distill complex topics into jargon-free statements that are readily understood. And this lack of self-awareness (i.e. they don't understand that they're using specialized terms and/or skills) bleeds into everything they do.
I can see a bunch of engineers sitting in a review meeting all agreeing 'This is simple math. Let's do it!' Unless there's someone from a non-tech background in the meeting, there's unlikely to be someone saying 'Uh, our audience is people wanting a place to sleep. We shouldn't gate our service with math.'
- Calculates the sum on the first picture
- Reads the instructions
- Reads the instructions again
- Stares at the six pictures for one second
- Closes the page
What they keep out is people with Discalculia, which are in no way stupid or low IQ, just can't to math well. (They also would probably be able to do it, but probably take to long and/or get offended enough to not do it).
I want to know if I would be filtered out
https://www.sciencealert.com/do-brain-training-games-really-...
So if IQ is defined as your ability to solve that kind of problem, then yes, your IQ will increase.
> explicitly advertises that their methods can keep out "low-skilled workers" on "human fraud farms"
Uhm yeah. They're trying to keep people from human fraud farms (who happen to be low-skilled workers) out. It's not a weird elitist conspiracy to keep all low-IQ people from society out.
Why is HN so full of paranoid conspiracy theories?
It's probably not their intent to stop the latter, but the effect is still discriminatory.
In this case one (excluding "human fraud farms") and the other (excluding people who would work, but currently don't work, at human fraud farms) are the same thing. Not at all paranoid, in other words :)
Rather than the obvious boring reality which is that this is intended to keep low-skilled Indian captcha solvers out and as an unfortunate side effect also keeps low-IQ people out.
Because many of us have been to this rodeo before.
The history of the tech industry has no shortage of thought leaders, heroes, and jabbering masses with low morals and feet on both sides of the eugenics theory.