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Comment by vlunkr | Hacker News Reader

The other day I looked up the wordle answer (I know I know). The first result was a site where I had to scroll through about 19 paragraphs of SEO vomit to get to the answer. The page could literally have one word on it and serve it's purpose. If that isn't a sign that the the internet, or at least google search, is dead, I don't know what is.

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There's a whole industry of sites like this for NYT crossword answers, to the point that it's often impossible to get any organic results at all for something that's been clued in the Times, which is frustrating because I don't just want the answer (there's a button in the app that does that already), I want to learn about the thing I’m unfamiliar with. Luckily, most topics that come up have some content on Wikipedia so I go there instead.

lol the same happens with WSJ. It’s very disappointing to try and do a bit of research on a clue and get the answer on a bot site linked to the puzzle you’re doing. Interesting how they do it though.

Ugh yes that’s super annoying! I don’t want the answer spoon-fed to me. The point of searching it is to actually learn a little something which will help me remember in the future

It’s like a DDoS attack on your mind (distributed because everyone is doing it). The attention span economy at its finest.

Reminds me of those ways to catch spammers or bots by occupying some of their resources with meaningless tasks for as long as possible. Except it’s turned around.

Sometimes I wonder if there’s even any real money in ads anymore or if it’s just a giant circle jerk that slowly destroys society…

For future instances where you give up trying to figure out the wordle, I built a site to make that easier: www.wordlespoiler.com

Word of warning: it has the answer to both today and tomorrows wordles.

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