Hacker News Reader

Comment by giarc | Hacker News Reader

No ads, no pay to play, no upgrades, no sign in, no social graph, takes 2 minutes per day, everyone plays the same/one puzzle per day, unwritten rules you don't ruin it for others, etc etc. The perks are great, I hope the NYT doesn't change it. I could take an ad, but changes to anything else might make me stop playing.

View on HN

Plus, the "share" mechanism is obviously not an invasion of privacy or a tracking beacon. It just puts a cute unicode game board in your clipboard, as far as I can see.

Thanks, I didnt realize those shares were text and wondered how to export them. How cool!

Yeah they're just unicode emojis really simple to do and a big part of the popularity imo. From discord, twitter or whatsapp I can easily share and compare with a bunch of different groups of friends.

Once one sees that mechanism, it cannot be forgotten. Wide knowledge of the technique is among Wordle's gifts to the world.

If the NYT only adds a link to their home page on the share function it has been worth it for them, millions of impressions per day for almost 0 cost.

> I could take an ad

Why?

There is objectively nothing that NYT could add to the game to make it more interesting. It can only make it worse.

They could serve the correct words from server side so that it's not trivial to find them.

The original creator was not able to do that due to infrastructure limitations, but surely NYT would have the proper setup to handle that.

It always loads fast. Quite a nice feature..

Again, how does that improve the game?

For context, a Twitter bot was recently banned for automatically replying to Wordle tweets and spoiling the next day's word. Preventing that would improve the gameplay experience by defending against malicious disruption.

We know that wordle is completely trivial for computers to solve. Hiding the solutions won’t do anything to stop that particular behavior.

The game is perfect as is, and I’m sad that it will now be used to make money.

Not really. The bot can get its data from when NZ hits midnight, hours and hours before America and Europe etc. Even if it was always released at the exact same time globally, nothing to stop a bot solving it / fetching it immediately and replying to users posts from yesterday about what todays one is.

Is this to stop you from cheating?

So the fun word game stops working while commuting by train because it needs to stop me "cheating" in a purely fun /social game by phoning home during the time I have to play it, where the connection is spotty at best, and the quick game loop of guess, read result, think gets janked because of railway cuttings and tunnels?

All because someone coukd read the source to cheat and wouldn't, idk, just copy paste the squares about in their tweets?

Exactly. It's somewhat baffling to me how some people focus so much on the technology aspects of something to the point of forgetting that its success is due to the things that it does not do.

I don't see a point of this. I could probably find the correct word for today by Googling so server/client side does not make any difference if we all share the same word for the day which is I think the major feature behind the success.

+1 on everything you said, except it takes me more than 2 minutes per day. :D

Me too... was just showing off :)

There will be one ad but it will be Punch the Monkey and it will hover over the keyboard until you go to type. It will then move to the row below the one you are guessing.

Looking through the rest of NYT games, I can see this becoming a pay to play thing pretty soon.

They will absolutely change it.

The question is: would anyone pay low seven figures just for the privilege of hiding the same thing? They'd expect this investment to return few times. They'd either start pushing "better" (different) version to subscribed people, splitting the community. Or, as you mentioned, introduce ads. But I don't think just acquiring a channel to display ads was the goal (the article mentions the goal to grow subscriber base), because it's a fad that will fade away- good chances are this will happen before they manage to show enough ads to recoup the initial investment.

> No ads, no pay to play, no upgrades, no sign in, no social graph

yet.

The NYTimes mobile app has a section at the very bottom of the scroll with 5(+1) games. The +1 is for the crossword puzzle, which is included in mini form whole the full chonker requires its own subscription. I image they are going to give wordle top billing in the section. Maybe there'll be a page anyone can visit, but I think they'll use it to keep subscribers returning to the app daily, having to scroll past something they'll want to read on their way, seeing some adds and giving them one more reason not to stop the renewal charges.

The minute NYT starts to mess with it, clones are going to pop like mushrooms.

Um...

https://rwmpelstilzchen.gitlab.io/wordles/

> takes 2 minutes per day

I feel stupid.

Nah, you can actually solve it really fast if you have a few goto starting words. I use house, trail and one more I can't remember now. Longest I ever spent since then on Wordle has been maybe 3 minutes.

Dharmesh Shah (hubspot founder) built a tool called FirstWord that ranks word choices. https://firstword.com/

I'm expecting ads and also a hyperlink in the sharing copypasta at the very least.

Vowels are now behind a paywall.

I'd like to buy a vowel..

Well you can't. The best you can do is buy a license to use a vowel up to three times in the present game.

Any subsequent value usage must be repurchased. No trading of vowels.

Vowels on the Blockchain. Each user should be able to earn when they are done with the vowels they've purchased

Reply on news.ycombinator.com