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Comment by g_p | Hacker News Reader

Rejecting the cookie banner pops up a timed overlay (only appearing after you dismiss the game's onboarding guide) telling you that your cookie preferences are saved, unless you don't save cookies...

If you don't save cookies, this appears for 5 or so seconds above the keyboard every time you load the site.

A small nag, but a good reminder of the decay in user experience as soon as sites start adding tracking and similar. Wordle worked fine without this, but there's presumably little/no acquisition value in the eyes of the NYT without this tracking.

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> there's presumably little/no acquisition value in the eyes of the NYT without this tracking.

I pay their $4.99/month subscription for access to their "Games" package solely because it includes access to their full archive of daily crosswords (going back to 1993).

If they add a similar "archive" of the daily Wordles and allow payed users to replay past puzzles, that could presumably provide new value to them by enticing more paying customers.

FYI, there's already an archive that's free to use. [1] Although it shows basic stats, I was surprised that it doesn't show stats on how many guesses you took.

1: https://metzger.media/games/wordle-archive

Thanks. This is the first time I've tried it. I have no idea what the rules are. Oh well.

Aha, the most "innocent" of dark patterns.

How did Wordle track your progress and stats before? localStorage? I feel like this change is very subtle and very user friendly for an acquisition.

It was all in localstorage, yeah. You can still see a lot of it in localstorage, albeit with a bit more things there than before.

It still uses localStorage - see the key "nyt-wordle-state" in the new site.

It is so tiring to continue to see this justification for something. Just because some other unnamed thing is worse, is not a reason to be only 'a little bit bad'.

Do you think that, on its own, adding cookie popups is very user friendly and very subtle? We shouldn't explain away an action because 'someone else is worse'.

I t had to be individual browser cookies - because I could redo the puzzle in multiple browsers on the same device all with different histories

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