There was an (android) app to translate cat meows a few years ago … granted it was a bit frivolous, though they claimed underlying research.

The translation it produced of my cats meows into what they might want was plain low quality, the meows were easier to understand than the word soup produced. (Tying to get the cat to meow on command is a whole different factor)

I don’t have a source for this but I believe the first internet-pirated item was software, although “pirated” might not be the proper label for it… I vaguely recall an article where the “fathers” of the TCP protocol sent a new revision of some new tcp code across the globe to a 3rd party who did not own the rights to that code somewhere in the 1970s so world wide connections could be tested.

If this does not fit the piracy label then I would not be surprised if Tim Berners-Lee would have used/linked to some imagery or document he didn’t have rights for on his first build websites when testing “his” World Wide Web invention.

I strongly have the impression that with things like the puzzles you bring up is that an overwhelmingly large percentage of internet users has been conditioned to receive “compressed” information as quickly and massively as possible. 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.

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.