A bunch of my friends have a routine of playing a whole host of wordle variants daily. It's been amazing to watch.<p>dordle/quordle/octordle: Play 2, 4, or 8 boards at once. I find quordle to be the sweet spot.<p>xordle: Just one board but two secret words. A more puzzley feel. I made this one.<p>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.<p>semantle: Guess the word based on similarity of meanings rather than spelling.<p>worldle: Guess the country/territory by its shape.<p>chessle: Chess opening moves.<p>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.<p>So I think even if the NYT acquisition is distasteful to you, maybe Wordle still is an example of nice things we can have.
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.<p>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.
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".
Ironic since Wordle archive was just DCMA’d: <a href="https://www.theverge.com/2022/3/16/22980713/new-york-times-wordle-archive-takedown" rel="nofollow">https://www.theverge.com/2022/3/16/22980713/new-york-times-w...</a>
Is the NYT already monetizing it? If not, I think it is too early to tell.<p>I don't see any ads while playing it.<p>It loads a lot of scripts from what seem to be advertising related domains though:<p><pre><code> 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
</code></pre>
Are they already making money from this or what are all these external scripts about?
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
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:<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OXzfvYoFQFo" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OXzfvYoFQFo</a><p>If you found the article interesting, you may like this too!
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.<p>[1] <a href="https://gizmodo.com/wordle-ad-trackers-privacy-new-york-times-1848554549" rel="nofollow">https://gizmodo.com/wordle-ad-trackers-privacy-new-york-time...</a><p>[2] <a href="https://nypost.com/2022/02/18/wordle-now-bans-offensive-words-but-not-all-of-them/" rel="nofollow">https://nypost.com/2022/02/18/wordle-now-bans-offensive-word...</a><p>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?
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.<p><a href="https://archive.org" rel="nofollow">https://archive.org</a> 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.<p>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.<p>Finally, when you're done, visit <a href="https://hmpg.net/" rel="nofollow">https://hmpg.net/</a> and tune out.
You can still play the actual Wordle (and access all past, and apparently future, games) here, ad-free, monetization-free, gripe-free: <a href="https://timewarple.com/" rel="nofollow">https://timewarple.com/</a>
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.<p>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!
> 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.<p>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.
From the article:<p>“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.”<p>Sounds like it was a design failure then, by the creators own metrics
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.<p>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.<p>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.
Not nice things on the internet according to the author:
<i>spam
</i>swastikas
<i>d</i>cks<p>Nice things according to the author:
<i>Paywalls
</i>tracking
<i>targeted advertising
</i>evil corporations like nyt
*arbitrary moderation
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 <i>yawn</i><p>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.