18 ms·

Josh Wardle created Wordle as part of an ongoing quest to design online spaces

185 points by caaqil 5y ago

srhgadhsfj 5y ago
Not nice things on the internet according to the author: spam swastikas dcks Nice things according to the author: Paywalls tracking targeted advertising evil corporations like nyt *arbitrary moderation
- BasDirks 5y ago
  Why is nyt evil?
  - Ralfp 5y ago
    I wouldn’t call whole NYT evil, but it is notorious for making their subscription impossible to cancel, especially when you are living abroad.
- jimbob45 5y ago
  You’re right - Wordle shows that we can’t have nice things. Newgrounds, on the other hand, is still running strong and is proof people don’t actually want the old internet they claim to want.
- unethical_ban 5y ago
  All decent moderation has a tinge of bias to it. Otherwise trolls and saboteurs will pollute the conversation with bullshit. But the idea someone is calling NYT evil without evidence or explanation, as if it is so self-evident as to not need any more, tells me what I need to know about the comment.
alar44 5y ago
Holy shit enough about Wordle already.
- School-Cotton 5y ago
  What forced you to click on this post?
  - dangus 5y ago
    As much as I don't like unsubstantial comments, I can't disagree. We have definitely heard enough about Wordle.
    - School-Cotton 5y ago
      What forced _you_ to click on the post?
      - dangus 5y ago
        I'm here because I'm bored and don't want to work today. I can click on whatever I want. I think it's pretty fair ask for someone on a boredom mitigation platform to want fresh content.
        lanstin 5y ago
        Nicely argued.
      - MarcoZavala 5y ago
  - alar44 5y ago
    I chose to because I'm sick of seeing shit about wordle multiple times a day. It's going to fade away and no one is going to remember what is is in a year. It's just an annoying fad and an uninteresting little puzzle. Yet I keep seeing it everywhere dozens of times a day.
ridaj 5y ago
No, because it got bought by NYT. It was absolutely glorious as an indie phenomenon but to see it fold into a giant media conglomerate so quickly is yawn The most epic move would have been to pull the plug on wordle right at its peak, which was about two weeks ago. Not sell out. Just rip it out clean and let a thousand sorry clones try to compete for crumbs. That would've been an awesome statement.
- kshacker 5y ago
  What did you lose? I started playing just before ir was bought and I still enjoy a game a day like I started.
  - ridaj 5y ago
    The illusion of innocence? The perspective that it might still be possible, on a shoestring budget within reach of a modest person, to create a massive, worldwide collective experience, that is engaging and fun without having any commercial ulterior motive?
  - Ansil849 5y ago
    > What did you lose? User privacy, for one. The wordle page is now full of trackers. Freedom from arbitrary corporate decisions about which words are acceptable or not ('slave' is no longer acceptable, while 'cunts' is, for example) is another loss.
    - travisgriggs 5y ago
      I use Brave Browser. I’m not an ad tech guru. I _feel_ that these various trackers you mention on this page shouldn’t have much (if any) purchase on my visits. But it could be a naive placebo effect. I’m curious from anyone who is more knowledgeable than me about whether what you mention is largely muted by using Brave, or if it’s just a feel good that actually does little?
    - not2b 5y ago
      I just checked; "slave" is an acceptable guess in Wordle, as is "cunts". And I don't understand complaints about trackers; don't you know how to filter them out? I personally use Privacy Badger but there are many other choices.
syncerr 5y ago
Ironic since Wordle archive was just DCMA’d: https://www.theverge.com/2022/3/16/22980713/new-york-times-wordle-archive-takedown https://www.theverge.com/2022/3/16/22980713/new-york-times-w...
- dehrmann 5y ago
  Nit: it likely wasn't done though the DMCA: > It’s still unclear what went down legally between the NYT and the Wordle Archive, but a spokesperson for the news outlet vaguely told Ars Technica that the archive’s “usage was unauthorized, and we were in touch with them.”
Ansil849 5y ago
If anything, Wordle is proof that we can't have nice things. It is now full of privacy-eroding trackers [1] and nonsensical, inconsistent, and seemingly arbitrary word bans [2] -- wherein words like "agora" and "slave" have been removed, while words like "fucks" and "cunts" are apparently just fine. [1] https://gizmodo.com/wordle-ad-trackers-privacy-new-york-times-1848554549 https://gizmodo.com/wordle-ad-trackers-privacy-new-york-time... [2] https://nypost.com/2022/02/18/wordle-now-bans-offensive-words-but-not-all-of-them/ https://nypost.com/2022/02/18/wordle-now-bans-offensive-word... edit: it seems like sometime today, NYT re-added the previously-removed words like "slave" or "agora" or "wench" or any of the other words which up to today had been removed. That is interesting timing - did someone read this comment, or just coincidence?
- 3np 5y ago
  Absence of proof is not proof of absence. We can have nice things on the internet. Even if Wordle got corrupted by spyware.
  - Ansil849 5y ago
    'This is why we can't have nice things', which is what my comment (and likely the article title) was referencing, is an idiomatic, not a literal, expression [1]. [1] https://idioms.thefreedictionary.com/this+is+why+we+can%27t+have+nice+things https://idioms.thefreedictionary.com/this+is+why+we+can%27t+...
    - 3np 5y ago
      Sure, I'm aware. "Proof" is a too strong assertion either way.
- onion2k 5y ago
  "slave" wasn't removed. It's still a valid guess word, as are both "fucks" and "cunts" (I just checked, and still got today's word in 4). All the NYT did is 'demote' it from the special list of daily words because, fairly obviously, the NYT belive the optics of using the word as a way to make money is a bit complicated. There's no good reason why the NYT shouldn't have full control over an app they paid upwards of a million dollars for...
_boffin_ 5y ago
VLC is where it's at.
gnicholas 5y ago
I played Wordle for a month before it was bought by the NYT. When it was acquired, I then binged a bit on the archive site, but then I stopped playing Wordle at all. Interestingly, I also stopped playing Spelling Bee, which I used to play regularly. I think it's because I know if I play one game I'll end up wanting to then play the other, and it just becomes a time suck. Before the NYT bought it, playing Wordle didn't trigger me to play Spelling Bee (or vice-versa), but now it would — so I end up playing neither. Weird!
furyofantares 5y ago
A bunch of my friends have a routine of playing a whole host of wordle variants daily. It's been amazing to watch. dordle/quordle/octordle: Play 2, 4, or 8 boards at once. I find quordle to be the sweet spot. xordle: Just one board but two secret words. A more puzzley feel. I made this one. squardle: Sort of a crossword of wordles doing 6 at a time. Your feedback has some spatial meaning rather than all the puzzles and hints being done in parallel. semantle: Guess the word based on similarity of meanings rather than spelling. worldle: Guess the country/territory by its shape. chessle: Chess opening moves. ordsnille: Swedish wordle. I don't know Swedish but I do this one, using 5 letter words I find on the page then guessing plausible words. I'm slowly building up a valid word list by playing. So I think even if the NYT acquisition is distasteful to you, maybe Wordle still is an example of nice things we can have.
- School-Cotton 5y ago
  Try tradle! The scoring function is the same as worldle, but the initial clue is a treemap chart of the country’s exports.
- haraball 5y ago
  Thanks for this list! A favourite of mine is heardle (https://www.heardle.app/ https://www.heardle.app/): Guess the song based on the first seconds.
- vcoelho 5y ago
  gremi.ooo: guess grêmio foot-ball porto alegrense's player of the day
- madcaptenor 5y ago
  A few others: sedecordle (https://www.sedecordle.com/ https://www.sedecordle.com/) - 16 at once. I think I'd like this if I could open it on a big screen and see all the words side by side, but as it is there's too much scrolling. I agree that quordle's the sweet spot. squareword (https://squareword.org/ https://squareword.org/) - form a five-by-five word square nerdle (https://nerdlegame.com/ https://nerdlegame.com/) - a numerical equation instead of words
- 5y ago
noufalibrahim 5y ago
I think there are several nice things on the Internet. They're mostly run by individuals or non profits. Startups or large companies run the most visited sites and that more or less takes over the internet experience for most people. https://archive.org https://archive.org is still an underrated corner of the internet. Other sites like LibreVox, Project Gutenberg, several blogs run by individuals, webcomics (xkcd), small merchants, community sites, MOOCs (private and large ones) etc. who are all great and I can't think of any way other than the Internet to get access to them. There is a centralising effect at work (e.g. people use discord rather than personal forum sites, medium instead of personal blogs etc.) but it's still not a dead end. I think treating the net like a resource rather than a "way of life" or a something to binge on is the good way think about it. The latter is what companies try to make us do for their bottom line but that doesn't mean that it's the only thing out there. Finally, when you're done, visit https://hmpg.net/ https://hmpg.net/ and tune out.
- rchaud 5y ago
  You're right, there's plenty of cool stuff still on the web. Created by a single person or small team, and designed to be "home cooked", i.e. not a "product". The problem is that "product" people invest in SEO and paid search/paid social so they're easier to find online. "Creator" people are happy if only a handful of people use it.
  - noufalibrahim 5y ago
    I agree. During the early days of my exposure to the (pre Google) internet, friends used to tell me URLs and I wrote them down in a pocketbook to chase them later. Every site was something new. Now, everything is responsive, minimalistic, using one of 5 or 10 CSS frameworks. There's definitely progress but there's also something lost.
blacklivsmatr 5y ago
Wordle may or may not be proof but there are plenty of nice things on the internet. Tons of personal blogs, tutorials written by experts for fun, etc. It might be true that on average, random articles are horrible, especially on mobile where every 4/5ths of a screen a new animated ad appears (I just leave the site). But, for there's still plenty of sites made with TLC
birken 5y ago
To offset all the negative comments, I'll agree with the premise of the article: Wordle was a nice thing that didn't seem to have any of the negative emergent behaviors of his past projects. It's a fun thing that everybody in my family does and gets to chat about every day. It's very cool that a guy wrote a piece of software that has positively impacted millions of people, and it's very cool that he was able to make money from it, and it's very cool that it is being supported and maintained in perpetuity by its new owner. I also don't understand all the complaining about ads and trackers. I guess every single person here releases every project completely out of the goodness of their own hearts without any analytics or ads or any aspirations to monetize it? If so, good for you, but just because something may be monetized (probably tastefully) at some point in the future doesn't take away from the fact that a cool and fun thing was created.
- scim-knox-twox 5y ago
  > [...] just because something may be monetized (probably tastefully) at some point in the future doesn't take away from the fact that a cool and fun thing was created Just because something may be monetized at some point in the future doesn't mean tracking your users without their consent.
  - andai 5y ago
    I get a consent popup every time I open Wordle: https://files.catbox.moe/sgc4r4.jpeg https://files.catbox.moe/sgc4r4.jpeg
    - Bilal_io 5y ago
      that's weird. I play Wordle everyday, I don't remember ever seeing this window.
      - bduerst 5y ago
        It's likely a location-dependent notification, based on regional laws and regulations. Disabling cookies probably also disables it storing your notification.
orlp 5y ago
As a Dutchman I find the Wordle craze a bit strange since it has been on our national television as a game show for decades under the name Lingo.
- webkike 5y ago
  Wordle is a game everyone can play every 24 hours. The game show is… a game show
  - Dma54rhs 5y ago
    There were flash games in 2000's of wordle where you can play any time you want :)
    - webkike 5y ago
      And that makes it less appealing than Wordle still?
- TekMol 5y ago
  Jesus, you are right! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Hqq3VjrcFc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Hqq3VjrcFc I guess this means, everybody can build games like this and the NYT would not be able to say they infringed on a game concept they own?
  - petepete 5y ago
    Lingo isn't wholly original. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jotto https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jotto
    - hackernewds 5y ago
      Nothing is original. One who is tasked to create a pie from scratch will have to invent firstly the whole universe
  - Hasnep 5y ago
TekMol 5y ago
Is the NYT already monetizing it? If not, I think it is too early to tell. I don't see any ads while playing it. It loads a lot of scripts from what seem to be advertising related domains though: insight.adsrvr.org platform.iteratehq.com static.chartbeat.net sb.scorecardresearch.com tags.bluekai.com tags.bkrtx.com www.googletagmanager.com analytics.twitter.com c.bing.com googleads.g.doubleclick.net sync-tm.everesttech.net www.google.com Are they already making money from this or what are all these external scripts about?
- charcircuit 5y ago
  Those are all for various analytics.
  - autoexec 5y ago
    They;re still trackers and there's no reason to think that data collected for "analytics" isn't also used for "advertising", or for "selling to the highest bidder if we get desperate enough for money".
beardyw 5y ago
Every morning my wife and I stop for coffee and wordle, which we do together. It seems just perfect.
- giarc 5y ago
  I do it early every morning while my wife scrambles to get it done before midnight. She hates when I read over her shoulder, knowing I'm aware of the word.
ocdtrekkie 5y ago
I'm amazed not a single comment here has talked about these Reddit projects: Place and The Button were insanely notable when they happened. I am blown away to learn the same guy was behind them. I assumed Wordle was somewhat of a one-hit wonder, but it sounds like Josh has a knack for making some pretty popular online phenomena.
- hideo 5y ago
  It’s incredible to me that one person has had such a large impact on internet pop culture. I wonder how many distinct individuals have been regular users of his games.
- MarcoZavala 5y ago
- steve76 5y ago
- giarc 5y ago
  I think it is a one-hit wonder. Obviously the button and place were popular games, but they were instantly shown to a billion people when launched. They could have launched tic-tac-toe and it would have been popular.
  - Handytinge 5y ago
    I don't think that's true. It's difficult to convey the amount of overnight culture that came from "the button". It wasn't a game for many people, it was an absolute obsession for months to hundreds of thousands of people. It's very easy to discount if you weren't there, fair enough.
- octokatt 5y ago
  Thank you for bringing this up; I think a lot of programmers might look at Wordless, see a seven-figure payout, and beat themselves up for not managing to do the same when their experience level is vastly different.
GrumpyNl 5y ago
This game has been on tv for years in the Netherlands, called lingo.
- Tijdreiziger 5y ago
  In fact, it's originally from the US and aired in no less than 16 countries: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lingo_(American_game_show) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lingo_(American_game_show)
- giarc 5y ago
  I see this comment a lot. What's the point? Do people look at "Who Wants To Be A Millionaire" and say "trivia has been around forever"?
mgas 5y ago
You can still play the actual Wordle (and access all past, and apparently future, games) here, ad-free, monetization-free, gripe-free: https://timewarple.com/ https://timewarple.com/
- TAKEMYMONEY 5y ago
  That has tracking (like the original) so it's not gripe-free; according to HN it completely ruins the game.
  - mgas 5y ago
    I guess nothing is gripe-free these days. Sheesh.
dangus 5y ago
I'm a big fan of Worldle: https://worldle.teuteuf.fr https://worldle.teuteuf.fr
slingnow 5y ago
From the article: “My idea was that this should only ask for three minutes of your time,” Wardle told me. “It doesn’t addict you, it doesn’t record your data, it doesn’t track you, there was no way to pay for it or run ads against it—basically, it was designed not to go viral.” Sounds like it was a design failure then, by the creators own metrics
MarcoZavala 5y ago
dejawu 5y ago
Many of the points in the New Yorker article were also shared by Wardle himself in this (pre-Wordle) talk about April Fools Day at Reddit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OXzfvYoFQFo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OXzfvYoFQFo If you found the article interesting, you may like this too!
MattGrommes 5y ago
The thing that makes Wordle successful to me is the fact it allows and encourages actual social interaction, not the fake "social" of having to hear what every yahoo has to say about something. I don't post mine on Facebook or Twitter but my friends do and it's nice to have a small fun thing to chat about. I talk to my wife about it once we're both done. We need more of these kinds of things that are social without being "social".
- shmoogy 5y ago
  It's fun because it became a viral literally everybody I know started doing. I'm a bit burned out now after doing all of the variants every day and trying to be overly competitive squareword, quardle, octordle, sedecordle, worldle, heardle.. there's too many now
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
officeplant 5y ago
Wordle was great for teaching me how to expand my twitter word block list to include emotes/symbols.
bckr 5y ago
> TOTAL CHAOS is not a good opening guess. UTTER BLISS isn’t reliable, either. Better to start with STORY, or MAYBE, and take it from there. Loved this near the end. It's a description of a strategy for winning Wordle, but it's also a poetic description for how to approach life.

185 points by caaqil 5y ago

Not nice things on the internet according to the author: spam swastikas dcks Nice things according to the author: Paywalls tracking targeted advertising evil corporations like nyt *arbitrary moderation

BasDirks 5y ago
Why is nyt evil?
- Ralfp 5y ago
  I wouldn’t call whole NYT evil, but it is notorious for making their subscription impossible to cancel, especially when you are living abroad.
jimbob45 5y ago
You’re right - Wordle shows that we can’t have nice things. Newgrounds, on the other hand, is still running strong and is proof people don’t actually want the old internet they claim to want.
unethical_ban 5y ago
All decent moderation has a tinge of bias to it. Otherwise trolls and saboteurs will pollute the conversation with bullshit. But the idea someone is calling NYT evil without evidence or explanation, as if it is so self-evident as to not need any more, tells me what I need to know about the comment.

alar44 5y ago

Holy shit enough about Wordle already.

School-Cotton 5y ago
What forced you to click on this post?
- dangus 5y ago
  As much as I don't like unsubstantial comments, I can't disagree. We have definitely heard enough about Wordle.
  - School-Cotton 5y ago
    What forced _you_ to click on the post?
    - dangus 5y ago
      I'm here because I'm bored and don't want to work today. I can click on whatever I want. I think it's pretty fair ask for someone on a boredom mitigation platform to want fresh content.
      - lanstin 5y ago
        Nicely argued.
    - MarcoZavala 5y ago
- alar44 5y ago
  I chose to because I'm sick of seeing shit about wordle multiple times a day. It's going to fade away and no one is going to remember what is is in a year. It's just an annoying fad and an uninteresting little puzzle. Yet I keep seeing it everywhere dozens of times a day.

ridaj 5y ago

No, because it got bought by NYT. It was absolutely glorious as an indie phenomenon but to see it fold into a giant media conglomerate so quickly is yawn The most epic move would have been to pull the plug on wordle right at its peak, which was about two weeks ago. Not sell out. Just rip it out clean and let a thousand sorry clones try to compete for crumbs. That would've been an awesome statement.

kshacker 5y ago
What did you lose? I started playing just before ir was bought and I still enjoy a game a day like I started.
- ridaj 5y ago
  The illusion of innocence? The perspective that it might still be possible, on a shoestring budget within reach of a modest person, to create a massive, worldwide collective experience, that is engaging and fun without having any commercial ulterior motive?
- Ansil849 5y ago
  > What did you lose? User privacy, for one. The wordle page is now full of trackers. Freedom from arbitrary corporate decisions about which words are acceptable or not ('slave' is no longer acceptable, while 'cunts' is, for example) is another loss.
  - travisgriggs 5y ago
    I use Brave Browser. I’m not an ad tech guru. I _feel_ that these various trackers you mention on this page shouldn’t have much (if any) purchase on my visits. But it could be a naive placebo effect. I’m curious from anyone who is more knowledgeable than me about whether what you mention is largely muted by using Brave, or if it’s just a feel good that actually does little?
  - not2b 5y ago
    I just checked; "slave" is an acceptable guess in Wordle, as is "cunts". And I don't understand complaints about trackers; don't you know how to filter them out? I personally use Privacy Badger but there are many other choices.

syncerr 5y ago

Ironic since Wordle archive was just DCMA’d: https://www.theverge.com/2022/3/16/22980713/new-york-times-wordle-archive-takedown https://www.theverge.com/2022/3/16/22980713/new-york-times-w...

dehrmann 5y ago
Nit: it likely wasn't done though the DMCA: > It’s still unclear what went down legally between the NYT and the Wordle Archive, but a spokesperson for the news outlet vaguely told Ars Technica that the archive’s “usage was unauthorized, and we were in touch with them.”

Ansil849 5y ago

If anything, Wordle is proof that we can't have nice things. It is now full of privacy-eroding trackers [1] and nonsensical, inconsistent, and seemingly arbitrary word bans [2] -- wherein words like "agora" and "slave" have been removed, while words like "fucks" and "cunts" are apparently just fine. [1] https://gizmodo.com/wordle-ad-trackers-privacy-new-york-times-1848554549 https://gizmodo.com/wordle-ad-trackers-privacy-new-york-time... [2] https://nypost.com/2022/02/18/wordle-now-bans-offensive-words-but-not-all-of-them/ https://nypost.com/2022/02/18/wordle-now-bans-offensive-word... edit: it seems like sometime today, NYT re-added the previously-removed words like "slave" or "agora" or "wench" or any of the other words which up to today had been removed. That is interesting timing - did someone read this comment, or just coincidence?

3np 5y ago
Absence of proof is not proof of absence. We can have nice things on the internet. Even if Wordle got corrupted by spyware.
- Ansil849 5y ago
  'This is why we can't have nice things', which is what my comment (and likely the article title) was referencing, is an idiomatic, not a literal, expression [1]. [1] https://idioms.thefreedictionary.com/this+is+why+we+can%27t+have+nice+things https://idioms.thefreedictionary.com/this+is+why+we+can%27t+...
  - 3np 5y ago
    Sure, I'm aware. "Proof" is a too strong assertion either way.
onion2k 5y ago
"slave" wasn't removed. It's still a valid guess word, as are both "fucks" and "cunts" (I just checked, and still got today's word in 4). All the NYT did is 'demote' it from the special list of daily words because, fairly obviously, the NYT belive the optics of using the word as a way to make money is a bit complicated. There's no good reason why the NYT shouldn't have full control over an app they paid upwards of a million dollars for...

_boffin_ 5y ago

VLC is where it's at.

gnicholas 5y ago

I played Wordle for a month before it was bought by the NYT. When it was acquired, I then binged a bit on the archive site, but then I stopped playing Wordle at all. Interestingly, I also stopped playing Spelling Bee, which I used to play regularly. I think it's because I know if I play one game I'll end up wanting to then play the other, and it just becomes a time suck. Before the NYT bought it, playing Wordle didn't trigger me to play Spelling Bee (or vice-versa), but now it would — so I end up playing neither. Weird!

furyofantares 5y ago

A bunch of my friends have a routine of playing a whole host of wordle variants daily. It's been amazing to watch. dordle/quordle/octordle: Play 2, 4, or 8 boards at once. I find quordle to be the sweet spot. xordle: Just one board but two secret words. A more puzzley feel. I made this one. squardle: Sort of a crossword of wordles doing 6 at a time. Your feedback has some spatial meaning rather than all the puzzles and hints being done in parallel. semantle: Guess the word based on similarity of meanings rather than spelling. worldle: Guess the country/territory by its shape. chessle: Chess opening moves. ordsnille: Swedish wordle. I don't know Swedish but I do this one, using 5 letter words I find on the page then guessing plausible words. I'm slowly building up a valid word list by playing. So I think even if the NYT acquisition is distasteful to you, maybe Wordle still is an example of nice things we can have.

School-Cotton 5y ago
Try tradle! The scoring function is the same as worldle, but the initial clue is a treemap chart of the country’s exports.
haraball 5y ago
Thanks for this list! A favourite of mine is heardle (https://www.heardle.app/ https://www.heardle.app/): Guess the song based on the first seconds.
vcoelho 5y ago
gremi.ooo: guess grêmio foot-ball porto alegrense's player of the day
madcaptenor 5y ago
A few others: sedecordle (https://www.sedecordle.com/ https://www.sedecordle.com/) - 16 at once. I think I'd like this if I could open it on a big screen and see all the words side by side, but as it is there's too much scrolling. I agree that quordle's the sweet spot. squareword (https://squareword.org/ https://squareword.org/) - form a five-by-five word square nerdle (https://nerdlegame.com/ https://nerdlegame.com/) - a numerical equation instead of words
5y ago

noufalibrahim 5y ago

I think there are several nice things on the Internet. They're mostly run by individuals or non profits. Startups or large companies run the most visited sites and that more or less takes over the internet experience for most people. https://archive.org https://archive.org is still an underrated corner of the internet. Other sites like LibreVox, Project Gutenberg, several blogs run by individuals, webcomics (xkcd), small merchants, community sites, MOOCs (private and large ones) etc. who are all great and I can't think of any way other than the Internet to get access to them. There is a centralising effect at work (e.g. people use discord rather than personal forum sites, medium instead of personal blogs etc.) but it's still not a dead end. I think treating the net like a resource rather than a "way of life" or a something to binge on is the good way think about it. The latter is what companies try to make us do for their bottom line but that doesn't mean that it's the only thing out there. Finally, when you're done, visit https://hmpg.net/ https://hmpg.net/ and tune out.

rchaud 5y ago
You're right, there's plenty of cool stuff still on the web. Created by a single person or small team, and designed to be "home cooked", i.e. not a "product". The problem is that "product" people invest in SEO and paid search/paid social so they're easier to find online. "Creator" people are happy if only a handful of people use it.
- noufalibrahim 5y ago
  I agree. During the early days of my exposure to the (pre Google) internet, friends used to tell me URLs and I wrote them down in a pocketbook to chase them later. Every site was something new. Now, everything is responsive, minimalistic, using one of 5 or 10 CSS frameworks. There's definitely progress but there's also something lost.

blacklivsmatr 5y ago

Wordle may or may not be proof but there are plenty of nice things on the internet. Tons of personal blogs, tutorials written by experts for fun, etc. It might be true that on average, random articles are horrible, especially on mobile where every 4/5ths of a screen a new animated ad appears (I just leave the site). But, for there's still plenty of sites made with TLC

birken 5y ago

To offset all the negative comments, I'll agree with the premise of the article: Wordle was a nice thing that didn't seem to have any of the negative emergent behaviors of his past projects. It's a fun thing that everybody in my family does and gets to chat about every day. It's very cool that a guy wrote a piece of software that has positively impacted millions of people, and it's very cool that he was able to make money from it, and it's very cool that it is being supported and maintained in perpetuity by its new owner. I also don't understand all the complaining about ads and trackers. I guess every single person here releases every project completely out of the goodness of their own hearts without any analytics or ads or any aspirations to monetize it? If so, good for you, but just because something may be monetized (probably tastefully) at some point in the future doesn't take away from the fact that a cool and fun thing was created.

scim-knox-twox 5y ago
> [...] just because something may be monetized (probably tastefully) at some point in the future doesn't take away from the fact that a cool and fun thing was created Just because something may be monetized at some point in the future doesn't mean tracking your users without their consent.
- andai 5y ago
  I get a consent popup every time I open Wordle: https://files.catbox.moe/sgc4r4.jpeg https://files.catbox.moe/sgc4r4.jpeg
  - Bilal_io 5y ago
    that's weird. I play Wordle everyday, I don't remember ever seeing this window.
    - bduerst 5y ago
      It's likely a location-dependent notification, based on regional laws and regulations. Disabling cookies probably also disables it storing your notification.

orlp 5y ago

As a Dutchman I find the Wordle craze a bit strange since it has been on our national television as a game show for decades under the name Lingo.

webkike 5y ago
Wordle is a game everyone can play every 24 hours. The game show is… a game show
- Dma54rhs 5y ago
  There were flash games in 2000's of wordle where you can play any time you want :)
  - webkike 5y ago
    And that makes it less appealing than Wordle still?
TekMol 5y ago
Jesus, you are right! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Hqq3VjrcFc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Hqq3VjrcFc I guess this means, everybody can build games like this and the NYT would not be able to say they infringed on a game concept they own?
- petepete 5y ago
  Lingo isn't wholly original. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jotto https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jotto
  - hackernewds 5y ago
    Nothing is original. One who is tasked to create a pie from scratch will have to invent firstly the whole universe
- Hasnep 5y ago

TekMol 5y ago

Is the NYT already monetizing it? If not, I think it is too early to tell. I don't see any ads while playing it. It loads a lot of scripts from what seem to be advertising related domains though: insight.adsrvr.org platform.iteratehq.com static.chartbeat.net sb.scorecardresearch.com tags.bluekai.com tags.bkrtx.com www.googletagmanager.com analytics.twitter.com c.bing.com googleads.g.doubleclick.net sync-tm.everesttech.net www.google.com Are they already making money from this or what are all these external scripts about?

charcircuit 5y ago
Those are all for various analytics.
- autoexec 5y ago
  They;re still trackers and there's no reason to think that data collected for "analytics" isn't also used for "advertising", or for "selling to the highest bidder if we get desperate enough for money".

beardyw 5y ago

Every morning my wife and I stop for coffee and wordle, which we do together. It seems just perfect.

giarc 5y ago
I do it early every morning while my wife scrambles to get it done before midnight. She hates when I read over her shoulder, knowing I'm aware of the word.

ocdtrekkie 5y ago

I'm amazed not a single comment here has talked about these Reddit projects: Place and The Button were insanely notable when they happened. I am blown away to learn the same guy was behind them. I assumed Wordle was somewhat of a one-hit wonder, but it sounds like Josh has a knack for making some pretty popular online phenomena.

hideo 5y ago
It’s incredible to me that one person has had such a large impact on internet pop culture. I wonder how many distinct individuals have been regular users of his games.
MarcoZavala 5y ago
steve76 5y ago
giarc 5y ago
I think it is a one-hit wonder. Obviously the button and place were popular games, but they were instantly shown to a billion people when launched. They could have launched tic-tac-toe and it would have been popular.
- Handytinge 5y ago
  I don't think that's true. It's difficult to convey the amount of overnight culture that came from "the button". It wasn't a game for many people, it was an absolute obsession for months to hundreds of thousands of people. It's very easy to discount if you weren't there, fair enough.
octokatt 5y ago
Thank you for bringing this up; I think a lot of programmers might look at Wordless, see a seven-figure payout, and beat themselves up for not managing to do the same when their experience level is vastly different.

GrumpyNl 5y ago

This game has been on tv for years in the Netherlands, called lingo.

Tijdreiziger 5y ago
In fact, it's originally from the US and aired in no less than 16 countries: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lingo_(American_game_show) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lingo_(American_game_show)
giarc 5y ago
I see this comment a lot. What's the point? Do people look at "Who Wants To Be A Millionaire" and say "trivia has been around forever"?

mgas 5y ago

You can still play the actual Wordle (and access all past, and apparently future, games) here, ad-free, monetization-free, gripe-free: https://timewarple.com/ https://timewarple.com/

TAKEMYMONEY 5y ago
That has tracking (like the original) so it's not gripe-free; according to HN it completely ruins the game.
- mgas 5y ago
  I guess nothing is gripe-free these days. Sheesh.

dangus 5y ago

I'm a big fan of Worldle: https://worldle.teuteuf.fr https://worldle.teuteuf.fr

slingnow 5y ago

From the article: “My idea was that this should only ask for three minutes of your time,” Wardle told me. “It doesn’t addict you, it doesn’t record your data, it doesn’t track you, there was no way to pay for it or run ads against it—basically, it was designed not to go viral.” Sounds like it was a design failure then, by the creators own metrics

MarcoZavala 5y ago

dejawu 5y ago

Many of the points in the New Yorker article were also shared by Wardle himself in this (pre-Wordle) talk about April Fools Day at Reddit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OXzfvYoFQFo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OXzfvYoFQFo If you found the article interesting, you may like this too!

MattGrommes 5y ago

The thing that makes Wordle successful to me is the fact it allows and encourages actual social interaction, not the fake "social" of having to hear what every yahoo has to say about something. I don't post mine on Facebook or Twitter but my friends do and it's nice to have a small fun thing to chat about. I talk to my wife about it once we're both done. We need more of these kinds of things that are social without being "social".

shmoogy 5y ago
It's fun because it became a viral literally everybody I know started doing. I'm a bit burned out now after doing all of the variants every day and trying to be overly competitive squareword, quardle, octordle, sedecordle, worldle, heardle.. there's too many now

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

officeplant 5y ago

Wordle was great for teaching me how to expand my twitter word block list to include emotes/symbols.

bckr 5y ago

> TOTAL CHAOS is not a good opening guess. UTTER BLISS isn’t reliable, either. Better to start with STORY, or MAYBE, and take it from there. Loved this near the end. It's a description of a strategy for winning Wordle, but it's also a poetic description for how to approach life.