IQcaptcha enters beta

This is occupying a weird place half-way between satire, and a real thing that could be useful. As a piece of mildly offensive satire, it works as-is; as a thing that could go on a real website, it doesn't.

On one hand: enforcing high standards can make for much better spaces, and impartial standards are great. There are some kinds of forums where requiring new users to solve a tricky math problem would be really good. There's a real, major problem with people entering and dragging down conversations that require knowledge they don't have, and flooding what could otherwise have been intellectual spaces with petty drama.

On the other hand, the way this is framed and presented seems unnecessarily alienating. It sets a high bar, while seeming to pretend that it's a low bar. It starts with a checkbox labelled "I'm not stupid", then asks a question which the majority of people won't be able to solve. If the label was more straightforward about where it was setting the bar, in a way that was respectful to the people it turned away (while still turning them away), I think this could be used on real sites.

Funny, but I think it would be funnier if it were less unsubtly rude. The concept is already inherently edgy enough that adding extra insults is like putting frosting on ice cream.

I very much agree with the premise, if taken literally rather than as satire. Communities that refuse to defend their borders eventually get destroyed.

That said, I can take most of the wording in the linked page as humor, but the blocked example was, at best, in bad taste, if not literally racist without context.

If LW did have an Eternal September-like crisis, I'm not sure what we'd do about it. A simple entry test like this seems like an option. But rather than an IQ-captcha, I'd like to see a rationality-captcha. Intelligence is not the same thing as rationality. [? · GW] Clever people tell themselves clever lies.

I wonder about accessibility. If you don't want to protect your website against "stupid... or e.g. blind... people", it would need an alternative non-visual version. Not sure what would be a good non-visual alternative to Raven's matrices.

I would probably err on the side of making it easier for blind users, because... well, anyone who figures out how to abuse this alternative is probably already smart enough.

The concept is amusing to me, but I wonder where exactly this would be useful. I agree with Rana Dexsin's comment that it seems less about "intelligence" and more about culture warring.

Aside: That I had to look up what "Eternal September" made me really confront my youth, hah. I do relate with the sadness that comes with your group's culture being diluted, but I think there are better ways to maintain cultural norms in the face of influxes of newcomers than this.

The fact that the author is advertising here is a little flattering, ignoring the fact that I only passed the test after two wrong tries. Oops. (I did the differentiation by hand and I checked that it was correct -- I got the wrong Matrix answer, apparently.)

Any chance you'd release this under a non-copyleft license?