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Comment by cwkoss | Hacker News Reader

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.

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A vestige of the old web. Now there will be tons of tracking and 20 MB of Javascript to download.

An 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.

It’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.

I'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...

Is this confirmed? I'd would think that NYT would require him to take it down as part of the purchase.

If 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.

Or you can play this fully functional IPFS mirror:

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.

Sadly, 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.

Not 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-gatew...

Wait. You can download this game?? And, would it still function as once a day?

You 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.

Yes, 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.

I mean I just downloaded it in Chrome, turned off my internet, and it worked fine.

I 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?

Subscriptions are an overused pricing model. Businesses love subscriptions because they love recurring revenue. The desire for RR pushes businesses to pursue products the fit the revenue model rather than solving customer problems. Consumers notice their bills stacking up with subscriptions and start to question the value they're getting for their subscription fees.

Some examples off the top of my head:

1. Grubhub's Plus, https://www.grubhub.com/plus

2. The majority of streaming services

3. Stitch Fix's recurring fix

4. Video game industry subscriptions (too many to dig into)

NYT's slavish devotion to a subscription model follows this pattern. They want to get subscriptions so they structure offerings to fit. Compare to a platform like Substack, where they offer a rich ecosystem with just a few different price models. I've believed for some time that news media like NYT overvalue their current offerings and need to innovate. Doesn't seem like they're interested.

Don't take my statement to claim all subscription offerings are bereft of value. Simply that there are so many lazy offerings that subscriptions are better as a signal of waste than value.

Excellent comment

Because it limits the content to only people who read enough NYT to be worth the subscription cost to them. It doesn't match most people's use case of bumping into a NYT article once in a while.

The NYT hasn't done anything yet, but why wouldn't people (here or anywhere else) be disappointed to see something they enjoyed that was free and easy to access suddenly become pay-walled off, plastered with ads, and used to mine their personal data?

The 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.

That'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.

There is a scan of the frontpage but it’s not legible.

https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/pages/pageone/sc...

I get paywalled on the first article on nyt.com.

That'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.

The front page of the printed edition has 5 full paragraphs.

The web version shows a headline and one sentence.

Those are links to articles, not the full articles themselves. Similar to the "continued on page x" in the printed version, you will need to go to the full article to read its contents.

NYT isn’t that dumb. Nobody would play this game behind a paywall…

Buying 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.

I think they will be that dumb. Or rather greedy.

(Is there a term like hanlon's razor for "never attribute to stupidity that which is adequately explained by greed"?)

Microsoft paywalled Solitaire, never underestimate corporate greed.

It’s free though…

$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.

Based on their reporting the past couple of years I wouldn’t be confident estimating the depth of their stupidity

Bad politics articles, while bad, are usually favors to their sources.

Obvious favor to sources hurt their credibility gravely.

When I think NYT, I think "mouthpiece of the powerful" not "hard hitting investigative reporting"

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