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This discussion, from #83 onwards, raises the question of whether The Listener is actually more difficult to decode nowadays than, say, 50 years ago; in the decades I've been having moderate success with The Listener I've never had less than the Chambers analytical CD as a tool, and latterly for a long time Wiki and Google: My solve rate has gone up from maybe 25% to nearly 100% now, and time for a successful solve from at least a week tp only a few days.

The people who regularly solved it back then, armed only with the cumbersome BRB and without the benefit of any modern search facilities, must have had formidably encyclopaedic general and cultural knowledge; did they use the even more cumbersome Britannica to check? Would we find it easier to solve those vintage puzzles?
Or are we intellectual pygmies in comparison?

Qiuxote, I have all of the compiled volumes of those antique puzzles. We're pygmies.

For me, a crossword shouldn’t be a test of esoteric knowledge. I get pleasure from identifying the theme and working out how it’s been woven in, not proving my general knowledge credentials. Plus, I get to learn something.

Although maybe that’s just my way of justifying my reliance on the app and Wikipedia…

And with regards to the knowledge of past solvers, I’m reminded of the fact that a few hundred years ago a well read person was expected to be abreast of all branches of science, maths, theology, philosophy, etc. Everyone was a polymath. Now a true polymath is rare, due to the vast amount of knowledge out there, hence the rise of interdisciplinary academic research.

Apropos of all this, my Listener buddy Annie44 commented:

I’ve been doing them (at first with my mother who had done them since they started) since the late 50s, and they seem more difficult now, requiring abstruse knowledge. Well maybe not actually more difficult because the knowledge is readily accessible. But with Brewer, ODQ, reasonable library, whatever word lists were available (I think not many), Dictionary of Fictional Characters (1963), one managed. Roget wasn’t much use but Mrs Bradford turning up in 1986 was a godsend.

Given the fact that I have solved a selection of Listener puzzles in compiled volumes covering the late sixties onwards it is my subjective view that puzzles from the internet era have largely been dumbed down. There are still plenty of stinkers but the older puzzles are, to this solver, on the whole, rather more difficult.

Perhaps the reason I tend to think them more difficult can simply be ascribed to age, frustratingly.