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The webdesign philosophy of wordle is practically the opposite of NYT's. Wordle is free, accountless, low friction. NYT will turn this into a subscription fun
by cwkoss 5y ago
The webdesign philosophy of wordle is practically the opposite of NYT's. Wordle is free, accountless, low friction. NYT will turn this into a subscription funnel, and it will lose all of its charm.
I look forward to continue playing until it gets moved to NYT, and then dropping off as soon as they put up a signin gate.
- Spivak 5y agoIt’s not so dire because you can continue to play “classic” Wordle forever — or well 2028 at least. It’s a static, front-end only app with a predetermined word list iterating in order.
- chrisshroba 5y agoI'd imagine NYT could technically copyright strike anyone that hosts it, given that they've now bought the copyright to that particular arrangement of words. I wonder if it will come to that. This has an "Ethereum Classic" feel to it...
- crackercrews 5y agoIs this confirmed? I'd would think that NYT would require him to take it down as part of the purchase.
- bostonsre 5y agoIf its static, you can just download it to your laptop and there isn't anything NYT could do to prevent you from playing it locally.
- taurusnoises 5y agoWait. You can download this game?? And, would it still function as once a day?
- jbc1 5y agoYes, the entire app is in the front end. It's not talking to a server to get new words of the day or checking answers. When you click the link and the game loads, it just loaded everything you needed to play it now, tomorrow, or some day in 2025.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- GrifMD 5y agoYou just need the index.html file and the main.[bundle_hash].js file. You can scrape out the Google Tag Manager import from index.html if you want, though I didn't check to see what tracking it was importing (probably basically analytics). But so long as you have those two files in a folder, you can open index.html and it'll work fine. My friends and I have been putting in joke words in a shared clone for each other and hosting it on GitHub Pages.
- nybble41 5y agoOr you can play this fully functional IPFS mirror: https://bafybeic4blel5vf4il73n3nzt6vw7npsov6or3cp3myjms4npiihxgjut4.ipfs.dweb.link/wordle/ https://bafybeic4blel5vf4il73n3nzt6vw7npsov6or3cp3myjms4npii... It's a static, client-side app with no server component, so it's not surprising that someone noticed that it works just as well if the same files are served from IPFS.
- bspammer 5y agoSadly, the social component of wordle is a big part of it, and that URL looks like something the average person would be scared of giving them a virus.
- nybble41 5y agoNot disagreeing with you about appearances, but in reality it's not any riskier than any other web site you might visit. Someone could create a friendlier URL via Cloudflare's public IPFS gateway and DNSLink[0], though that does introduce a potential point of failure (DNS). (Those with the IPFS Companion extension or the Brave browser would be redirected to their local IPFS node, so it would only be partly dependent on Cloudflare. However, someone has to pay for the domain.) [0] https://developers.cloudflare.com/distributed-web/ipfs-gateway/connecting-website#connecting-to-cloudflares-gateway https://developers.cloudflare.com/distributed-web/ipfs-gatew...
- Spivak 5y agoI mean I just downloaded it in Chrome, turned off my internet, and it worked fine.
- cush 5y agoNYT isn’t that dumb. Nobody would play this game behind a paywall…
- pcmoney 5y agoBased on their reporting the past couple of years I wouldn’t be confident estimating the depth of their stupidity
- NathanielK 5y agoMicrosoft paywalled Solitaire, never underestimate corporate greed.
- cush 5y agoIt’s free though…
- NathanielK 5y ago$15/yr for the premium version that removes ads. The original game that doesn't connect to the internet is removed from newer versions of Windows.
- makeitdouble 5y agoBuying a property and milking it fast enough to get a return before its full dead isn't "dumb" per se. Some companies have it as their core business model.
- WordHoot 5y ago[dead]
- VintageCool 5y agoHaving a timer running constantly in the corner counting up tenths of seconds makes your version much more stressful than Wordle.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- turdnagel 5y agoThe running timer is unnerving. Is there a way to disable it?
- WordHoot 5y agoThe vision I have for WordHoot is that it can become a competitive multiplayer word game in which speed is a factor, hence the timer. But I will implement an option to hide it for those who don't want it!
- gameman144 5y agoI hope your vision pans out! Definitely too stressful for me; I like checking in with my family throughout the day to see their scores, but I worry that the timer might turn that into more of a contest than the fun daily conversation-starter that Wordle is.
- WordHoot 5y agoThere's now a game mode where there is no timer or points. Click on "Time" in the stats box to activate it.
- winter_squirrel 5y ago
- 5y ago
- Yhippa 5y agoA vestige of the old web. Now there will be tons of tracking and 20 MB of Javascript to download.
- autoexec 5y agoAn example of the internet providing something for users and instead of being leveraged against them so that someone can line their pockets. I can't blame the guy for selling out to the NYT (I'd have done it myself), but it's sad to see how quickly greed takes over to ruin a good thing.
- ausbah 5y agoI still don't get why hacker news hates subscriptions so much. the NYT is always producing content so it has constant costs, everyone hates ads / they might now pay enough - so subs are the next best option?
- thakoppno 5y agoThe NYT has been the paper of record in the US for a very long time. To me, the strategy just seems very short sighted. There is no doubt in my mind that the paywall will ultimately lead to the paper’s decline. The prestige of The NYT as an institution is that everyone reads it. That cannot be the case on the Internet when competing with voluminous free content. At the very least, all the frontpage articles should not be paywalled. Even historically one could read the most important Times’ articles just glancing at a newsstand.
- cjpearson 5y agoThat's also how it works today, right? You can look at the front page for free, but you need a subscription if you want to read full articles.
- thakoppno 5y agoThere is a scan of the frontpage but it’s not legible. https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/pages/pageone/scan/ https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/pages/pageone/sc... I get paywalled on the first article on nyt.com.
- novemberryankee 5y agoThat's a scan of the printed version. You can look at the front page (nytimes.com) for free, but you need a subscription if you want to read more free articles than a limit allocated to non-subscribers. "Paywalled" means you can't read the full article, it's hidden or truncated.
- 5y ago