6 ms·

I made a site heavily inspired by lichess (specifically AGPL, no ads ever, free forever), but for crossword board games (think Scrabble, Words with Friends, etc

I made a site heavily inspired by lichess (specifically AGPL, no ads ever, free forever), but for crossword board games (think Scrabble, Words with Friends, etc). You can see it here at https://woogles.io https://woogles.io It has been growing steadily and we're about to hit 400K games played; it's the site of choice for the streaming community and we just finished hosting the World Blitz Championship this past week :) Thibault is sort of my hero. We've talked about doing some sort of cross-promotion but I'd like to polish our app a bit more before I follow up again.

earthscienceman 6y ago
I wish you the absolute best of luck. If this notion/method of operating community platforms takes off, the world will be far better for it. Imagine if the average human's interaction with the internet were open free (both as in beer and as in idealistically) platforms that encouraged social collaboration, personal interaction, and community formation. Wikipedia, Lichess... maybe woogles. It could easily be an impetus for social change in the meat-flesh world. Even more powerful if it seeps into "real" social media platforms. It sounds like a revival and reformation of the diverse community diasporas around during web 1.0. ... so much better than the vision for the future coming from the powerful technocrats living in silicon valley, the primary users of HackerNews. The future is for the people.
- dang 6y ago
  > the powerful technocrats living in silicon valley, the primary users of HackerNews. That's a serious misperception. Only about 10% of HN users were anywhere near SV, last I checked, and the vast majority of those aren't "powerful technocrats". I frequently see comments like this setting up (or expressing) barriers between the commenter and the rest of the community, when the truth is that the community is mostly just like themselves. I think it's important to realize this. How can we function as a community if people are suspecting and/or putting down everybody else who's here? https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  - fragmede 6y ago
    Have there been any posts doing analysis of the demographics of this site? And if not, could a data scientist come in, visiting professor style, and do one? I think it would be fascinating! (link just goes to guidelines site which does not discuss demographics)
    - dang 5y ago
      https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16633521 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16633521 comes to mind but is already 3 years old.
  - earthscienceman 6y ago
    Hi dang, thank you for taking the time to point that out. I think you are touching on something that's important to understand and overcome. I realized that my wording was poor as I thought more about my comment and you are correct to call me out. I'll try to be as honest/open/guidelined in my response as possible to bare fruit from an aggressive comment. While it might be true that the demographics of the site are 10% SV residents, I do sense a very existent divide here in the interests of the users of this site. And while my initial comment might not have perfectly followed the guidelines, I do often think it's important to push-back against the "money-above-all" culture that often steers this website, or at least the culture that underpins a lot of the discussions. I think, as the site is founded by a VC firm, there is inherently a large subset of users that are money driven technocrats. And more substantially, I think the resulting culture is a barrier to the actual substance of discussions here and to the impact of discussions/technology/startups/VCs/etc in general. And I broadly disagree with the perspective on community, society, money, and finance that the founders of YCombinator espouse. Views that are also shared by a portion of the user-base here. Let me label these two communities that I believe there is a barrier between: "FOSS-ers" and "startup-ers". I hope these labels are transparent enough that I don't even need to clearly define them. Thus, what I think that I'm trying to comment on, is that there is a real divide between these communities. Is there common ground? Absolutely. Am I willing to tolerate the "wealth-at-all costs" attitude that is pervasive here? Absolutely not. I think it's toxic and damaging to civil society and I think we're bearing that out at this exact moment in time. And I see HackerNews as an awkward, sometimes beautiful, ground-zero. Now, to be expressly clear with my position: I'm not anti-capitalism. I wouldn't even call myself a socialist. After all "socialism", as the word is colloquially used in the Anglo world (aka European EU-style socialism), is really just capitalism where some of the taxes are expressly earmarked for broad reaching social programs. I believe in competition and I believe in providing rewards to the people who are willing to take risks and create things in the world. I think that's fantastic. But I am suspicious of some users here. I think the actions of many VC firms, YC startups and their founders, and the resulting discussions on HN, border very often on anti-social. I don't believe Paul Graham's hypothesis that large sums of wealth aggregated via consumer capitalism is best used by VCs to create good in the world. It's typically used to acquire more wealth via blind consumer-oriented companies, with the occasional benevolent passion project. That wealth in the hands of a sufficiently/correctly motivated government, an institution created to serve the people, would create far more good and is a much better place for that money. I quite plainly believe that much more good would be created in the world using technology if these people had stricter morals, less money, and less selfish goals. I also believe that their wealth is inherently oppressive, as it bequeaths power to be even more selfish... and motivates others to follow suit. Something I think should be discussed here on this website. -------------- Now, I know that I'm riding the lines of the comment guidelines here. I know that this is pretty close to an ideological battle. But I hope that I'm closer to "curious thoughtful and substantive conversation" about ideologies on HN than I am to fulminating. I suppose I'll find out in your response. Thanks for all your effort here dang.
tux1968 6y ago
My sister plays a lot of scrabble so I am happy to be able to share your site with her. If I can be so bold as to offer one criticism of your site though, it was a bit confusing when I first clicked to look at it. The first page is a barrage of information none of which seemed relevant for my first visit. I clicked the links at the top of the page and ended up on completely different web sites with equally confusing first pages. Eventually I did click and watch a scrabble game being played, which looked great!
- cdelsolar 6y ago
  Appreciate the thoughts - thank you! We will pass your comments on to our designers :)
  - exikyut 6y ago
    I just had a look at the site myself having read the GP comment. The layout felt reasonably unambiguous and accessible to me personally, although everyone's different - but then when I clicked a game and wanted to go back to look at another one, I noticed that my browser's back button was disabled! Sure enough, a global search showed that you're using history.replace() to change the URL path. I can totally appreciate the likely trepidation about the work required to correctly juggle the JS history stack, but... it's very disorientating to see the back button greyed out :) I know it'll get fixed eventually, but I crashed into it within 6 seconds. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Also, it would be kind of cool to be able to watch active games, but the current UI doesn't really surface activity in any way. Adding this would naturally attract ebb and flow and interesting oscillatory behavior (with lots of people randomly joining and leaving) and whatnot, but it would also allow for actual large-scale spectation, and the general appearance of a site that's a Destination™ and a flurry of activity. (While probably obvious, I've just thought that recency (what's being played right now), activity (what's attracting the most chat and the most frequent/periodic/consistent movement), and volume (what has the most eyes on it) would all play a role in ranking.)
pbhjpbhj 6y ago
Presumably the owners of the trade marks you just referred to (Scrabble, etc.) are onboard [no pun intended!] with you? Otherwise I see tortuous infringement court cases in your future!? I thought Mattel only allowed their own online games to be called "Scrabble" RTM. Disclaimer: this is personal opinion and relates in no way to my employment.
- 0xffff2 6y ago
  >Disclaimer: this is personal opinion and relates in no way to my employment. I see this quite a bit on HN and I always thing it's silly, but this time it's particularly perplexing. Are you a lawyer for Mattel or something?
  - pbhjpbhj 6y ago
    I somehow knew someone would ask and mentally prepared a response! My employer thinks I shouldn't comment on social media at all because people might think I'm commenting in an official capacity. Their line is "don't use social media", so if there's a comment where an argument could be leveled against me that "people think this is a part of your employment" I indemnify myself against that argument. It's not unlike acknowledging the owner of a trademark, no-one can soundly claim people would think you own a mark if you point out you don't and name who does. I don't work for Mattel, fwiw.
    - roofwellhams 6y ago
      Why you don't create a new account that's not related to you or your company?
  - kixiQu 6y ago
    It's not silly only in proportion to your employer's aggression on the topic. Perhaps there needs to be an account disclaimer checkbox as a standard feature: "I speak in no official capacity related to any employer or professional role"....
    - 6y ago
zestros 6y ago
Any plans to allow the use of your site without a login? I'd like to play with my family but getting them all to create an account would be too difficult.
- cdelsolar 6y ago
  We have heard this a few times, and the backend supports it, but we need to make a few changes in the front end to make it happen. I think we'd like to do this in the future.
bspammer 6y ago
This is brilliant, just being able to spectate high ELO scrabble games is unreasonably entertaining. The kind of words these people come up with is crazy. I know lichess invests a lot of energy into catching cheaters, is that something you've had to look into? I imagine it's much harder to catch cheaters than in chess.
- cdelsolar 6y ago
  Yes, we actually have come up with some algorithms for flagging cheaters, and then a small team of experts reviews the games in question. The algorithms are the only part of the site that is closed source at the moment; if we move over to machine learning we may open them (I think of something like Irwin). The algorithms have been successful at catching a nontrivial number of cheaters already, most of whom have admitted it and gotten their account back after a suspension. It is a super cool problem - I think we can catch more with machine learning (the funny thing is, my day job is in fraud detection using machine learning, so there is some overlap :)
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
porphyra 6y ago
Yes!!! Finally --- it is about time that someone made a modern alternative to isc.ro which is full of security problems (e.g. passwords stored in plaintext; your rack is randomly generated on the clientside) and looks ugly.
olah_1 6y ago
On the mobile site, I couldn’t find any information on what the game is or how it works. Maybe add more of a header section to explain the game or have a picture of what it looks like in a game?

earthscienceman 6y ago

I wish you the absolute best of luck. If this notion/method of operating community platforms takes off, the world will be far better for it. Imagine if the average human's interaction with the internet were open free (both as in beer and as in idealistically) platforms that encouraged social collaboration, personal interaction, and community formation. Wikipedia, Lichess... maybe woogles. It could easily be an impetus for social change in the meat-flesh world. Even more powerful if it seeps into "real" social media platforms. It sounds like a revival and reformation of the diverse community diasporas around during web 1.0. ... so much better than the vision for the future coming from the powerful technocrats living in silicon valley, the primary users of HackerNews. The future is for the people.

dang 6y ago
> the powerful technocrats living in silicon valley, the primary users of HackerNews. That's a serious misperception. Only about 10% of HN users were anywhere near SV, last I checked, and the vast majority of those aren't "powerful technocrats". I frequently see comments like this setting up (or expressing) barriers between the commenter and the rest of the community, when the truth is that the community is mostly just like themselves. I think it's important to realize this. How can we function as a community if people are suspecting and/or putting down everybody else who's here? https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- fragmede 6y ago
  Have there been any posts doing analysis of the demographics of this site? And if not, could a data scientist come in, visiting professor style, and do one? I think it would be fascinating! (link just goes to guidelines site which does not discuss demographics)
  - dang 5y ago
    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16633521 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16633521 comes to mind but is already 3 years old.
- earthscienceman 6y ago
  Hi dang, thank you for taking the time to point that out. I think you are touching on something that's important to understand and overcome. I realized that my wording was poor as I thought more about my comment and you are correct to call me out. I'll try to be as honest/open/guidelined in my response as possible to bare fruit from an aggressive comment. While it might be true that the demographics of the site are 10% SV residents, I do sense a very existent divide here in the interests of the users of this site. And while my initial comment might not have perfectly followed the guidelines, I do often think it's important to push-back against the "money-above-all" culture that often steers this website, or at least the culture that underpins a lot of the discussions. I think, as the site is founded by a VC firm, there is inherently a large subset of users that are money driven technocrats. And more substantially, I think the resulting culture is a barrier to the actual substance of discussions here and to the impact of discussions/technology/startups/VCs/etc in general. And I broadly disagree with the perspective on community, society, money, and finance that the founders of YCombinator espouse. Views that are also shared by a portion of the user-base here. Let me label these two communities that I believe there is a barrier between: "FOSS-ers" and "startup-ers". I hope these labels are transparent enough that I don't even need to clearly define them. Thus, what I think that I'm trying to comment on, is that there is a real divide between these communities. Is there common ground? Absolutely. Am I willing to tolerate the "wealth-at-all costs" attitude that is pervasive here? Absolutely not. I think it's toxic and damaging to civil society and I think we're bearing that out at this exact moment in time. And I see HackerNews as an awkward, sometimes beautiful, ground-zero. Now, to be expressly clear with my position: I'm not anti-capitalism. I wouldn't even call myself a socialist. After all "socialism", as the word is colloquially used in the Anglo world (aka European EU-style socialism), is really just capitalism where some of the taxes are expressly earmarked for broad reaching social programs. I believe in competition and I believe in providing rewards to the people who are willing to take risks and create things in the world. I think that's fantastic. But I am suspicious of some users here. I think the actions of many VC firms, YC startups and their founders, and the resulting discussions on HN, border very often on anti-social. I don't believe Paul Graham's hypothesis that large sums of wealth aggregated via consumer capitalism is best used by VCs to create good in the world. It's typically used to acquire more wealth via blind consumer-oriented companies, with the occasional benevolent passion project. That wealth in the hands of a sufficiently/correctly motivated government, an institution created to serve the people, would create far more good and is a much better place for that money. I quite plainly believe that much more good would be created in the world using technology if these people had stricter morals, less money, and less selfish goals. I also believe that their wealth is inherently oppressive, as it bequeaths power to be even more selfish... and motivates others to follow suit. Something I think should be discussed here on this website. -------------- Now, I know that I'm riding the lines of the comment guidelines here. I know that this is pretty close to an ideological battle. But I hope that I'm closer to "curious thoughtful and substantive conversation" about ideologies on HN than I am to fulminating. I suppose I'll find out in your response. Thanks for all your effort here dang.

tux1968 6y ago

My sister plays a lot of scrabble so I am happy to be able to share your site with her. If I can be so bold as to offer one criticism of your site though, it was a bit confusing when I first clicked to look at it. The first page is a barrage of information none of which seemed relevant for my first visit. I clicked the links at the top of the page and ended up on completely different web sites with equally confusing first pages. Eventually I did click and watch a scrabble game being played, which looked great!

cdelsolar 6y ago
Appreciate the thoughts - thank you! We will pass your comments on to our designers :)
- exikyut 6y ago
  I just had a look at the site myself having read the GP comment. The layout felt reasonably unambiguous and accessible to me personally, although everyone's different - but then when I clicked a game and wanted to go back to look at another one, I noticed that my browser's back button was disabled! Sure enough, a global search showed that you're using history.replace() to change the URL path. I can totally appreciate the likely trepidation about the work required to correctly juggle the JS history stack, but... it's very disorientating to see the back button greyed out :) I know it'll get fixed eventually, but I crashed into it within 6 seconds. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Also, it would be kind of cool to be able to watch active games, but the current UI doesn't really surface activity in any way. Adding this would naturally attract ebb and flow and interesting oscillatory behavior (with lots of people randomly joining and leaving) and whatnot, but it would also allow for actual large-scale spectation, and the general appearance of a site that's a Destination™ and a flurry of activity. (While probably obvious, I've just thought that recency (what's being played right now), activity (what's attracting the most chat and the most frequent/periodic/consistent movement), and volume (what has the most eyes on it) would all play a role in ranking.)

pbhjpbhj 6y ago

Presumably the owners of the trade marks you just referred to (Scrabble, etc.) are onboard [no pun intended!] with you? Otherwise I see tortuous infringement court cases in your future!? I thought Mattel only allowed their own online games to be called "Scrabble" RTM. Disclaimer: this is personal opinion and relates in no way to my employment.

0xffff2 6y ago
>Disclaimer: this is personal opinion and relates in no way to my employment. I see this quite a bit on HN and I always thing it's silly, but this time it's particularly perplexing. Are you a lawyer for Mattel or something?
- pbhjpbhj 6y ago
  I somehow knew someone would ask and mentally prepared a response! My employer thinks I shouldn't comment on social media at all because people might think I'm commenting in an official capacity. Their line is "don't use social media", so if there's a comment where an argument could be leveled against me that "people think this is a part of your employment" I indemnify myself against that argument. It's not unlike acknowledging the owner of a trademark, no-one can soundly claim people would think you own a mark if you point out you don't and name who does. I don't work for Mattel, fwiw.
  - roofwellhams 6y ago
    Why you don't create a new account that's not related to you or your company?
- kixiQu 6y ago
  It's not silly only in proportion to your employer's aggression on the topic. Perhaps there needs to be an account disclaimer checkbox as a standard feature: "I speak in no official capacity related to any employer or professional role"....
  - 6y ago

zestros 6y ago

Any plans to allow the use of your site without a login? I'd like to play with my family but getting them all to create an account would be too difficult.

cdelsolar 6y ago
We have heard this a few times, and the backend supports it, but we need to make a few changes in the front end to make it happen. I think we'd like to do this in the future.

bspammer 6y ago

This is brilliant, just being able to spectate high ELO scrabble games is unreasonably entertaining. The kind of words these people come up with is crazy. I know lichess invests a lot of energy into catching cheaters, is that something you've had to look into? I imagine it's much harder to catch cheaters than in chess.

cdelsolar 6y ago
Yes, we actually have come up with some algorithms for flagging cheaters, and then a small team of experts reviews the games in question. The algorithms are the only part of the site that is closed source at the moment; if we move over to machine learning we may open them (I think of something like Irwin). The algorithms have been successful at catching a nontrivial number of cheaters already, most of whom have admitted it and gotten their account back after a suspension. It is a super cool problem - I think we can catch more with machine learning (the funny thing is, my day job is in fraud detection using machine learning, so there is some overlap :)
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]

porphyra 6y ago

Yes!!! Finally --- it is about time that someone made a modern alternative to isc.ro which is full of security problems (e.g. passwords stored in plaintext; your rack is randomly generated on the clientside) and looks ugly.

olah_1 6y ago

On the mobile site, I couldn’t find any information on what the game is or how it works. Maybe add more of a header section to explain the game or have a picture of what it looks like in a game?