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Comment by Ansil849 | Hacker News Reader

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.

[1] https://gizmodo.com/wordle-ad-trackers-privacy-new-york-time...

[2] https://nypost.com/2022/02/18/wordle-now-bans-offensive-word...

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?

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"slave" wasn't removed. It's still a valid guess word, as are both "fucks" and "cunts" (I just checked, and still got today's word in 4). All the NYT did is 'demote' it from the special list of daily words because, fairly obviously, the NYT belive the optics of using the word as a way to make money is a bit complicated. There's no good reason why the NYT shouldn't have full control over an app they paid upwards of a million dollars for...

Up until today 'slave' (and 'agora', and 'wench' and etc.) was removed. It seems like starting today NYT has reinstated the previously-removed words. Interesting.

They were re-added at least by Tuesday.

I just tested slave at 10:38AM pacific time Mar 17, 2022, and slave was not a valid guess.

“Not in word list” is the exact message.

https://www.nytimes.com/games/wordle/index.html

I hadn't tested myself, but I heard that they were only removed from being The Word Of The Day, not removed from the dictionary.

I think the issue was that words in the 'word-of-the-day' list are not repeated in the dictionary, so removing them from the 'word-of-the-day' list meant they were also no longer valid guesses.

Presumably this was pointed out to the NYT, and at some point they fixed the bug by adding any words removed from the 'word-of-the-day' list back into the valid guesses dictionary.

Yep. I definitely tried "slave" sometime in the past couple of months and it told me it wasn't a valid word.

What is wrong with agora? I thought that was just a Greek word for common market place, like agoraphobia?

Wordle, as we loved it, tracker-free and entirely non-evil, is still available to this day at https://web.archive.org/web/20220209234643id_/https://www.po...

What does evil in English mean nowadays?

I guess the google tracker on archive.org doesn't count for you?

While the idiocy of removing words is beyond me, I am curious about agora. What's wrong with that word?

(I am a French, non native speaker of English)

There don't seem to be any offensive uses for agora. Check the Urban Dictionary if there's ever a doubt. So that one might not have been pulled for PC reasons. Maybe they thought it was too archaic.

Well, a 3000 years old word is indeed quite archaic - but it is routinely taught in schools in France so that's the reason I may have not seen it as such. Good idea with the Urban Dictionary, thanks.

Some users may be agora-phobic

My guess is that they deemed it a little bit too obscure, but I don't know that and can't imagine the process used and there are probably plenty of words in the list to point at and quibble over.

One of the things about Wordle is that it can give you a good shot at a feeling of success. Having something that feels like an "obscure" word which causes you to fail, lessens that positive feeling that could keep players returning every day.

The list of possible solution words is different from the list of words you can input as a guess. “Agora” and “slave” were removed from the input list (they’re back now).

Do you know if they were also removed from the solutions list? My only guess is it was an internal communications problem, and words removed from the solutions wordlist got removed in the guesses wordlist too.

The way wordle was coded, the solutions and guesses word lists were nonoverlapping. When you guessed a word it would check it against both lists. So when NYT removed words from the solutions list they should have added them to the guesses word list so they could still be guessed, but they didn't. An easy mistake to make with an unfamiliar codebase.

Aha, that makes perfect sense, thanks!

I think it’s proof that you can’t have a thing exactly as you want it forever for no cost. And if that’s something a person needs proven to them, better learn the lesson through Wordle than something that really matters.

Actually what you can't have is your own personal, idiosyncratic sense of right / wrong dictated on everyone else.

Can anyone explain why "agora" (a Greek word meaning "market") was removed? I can at least perceive the motive, as silly as it is, behind the other two, but this one has me stumped.

Used to be the name of a large darknet market[0]. It's possibly on whatever list of naughty language they used to demote words.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agora_(online_marketplace)

I think AGORA was removed as an answer, as it's too obscure. Not as a guess word.

https://twitter.com/MikeySlezak/status/1493344574260924420

It is too obscure. Source: I am a fairly smart and well-read person and do not know the meaning of the word. You can't have a word that difficult in a game that has a win streak...it is like a reverse deus ex machina or something. Bam! You lose your streak for no reason!!!!

Counterpoint: You break your streak on a word you don't know. You get upset and look it up to see if it's even a real word. You discover that it means a Greek market, and start learning about that culture, maybe a little history.

Maybe you're pushed to learn other 5 letter words, to prevent yourself from losing your streak again. Maybe you start reading more because you want to expand your vocabulary.

All because you lost a precious game streak because you were pushed out of your comfort zone.

I do this on Worldle constantly since I find the geography interesting and gives me a reason to explore a little history briefly outside of the heavily Eurocentric world history I got in school.

But I'd still be annoyed at having to look up a word I never would use in real life. The countries actually exist and are possible travel destinations.

A measurable fraction of people who break streaks simply stop playing. Missing that dopamine hit of your streak counter incrementing (and being higher than your friends) can be worse than having no streak feature at all.

I really wish they would give definitions (or at least link to a dictionary) for all guessed words after playing - especially for all the clones like quordle/octordle where they often use weird words. I would send feedback but there's no contact information on any of these games.

Losing your streak on a word guessing game because you didn’t know a word seems like a perfectly reasonable thing.

Arguably, the possibility of this happening is what makes streaks have meaning and is the essence of the game.

They removed it simply to break parity with downloaded versions of the game. It was on the day that Agora was supposed to be played that the two diverged forever and locked you into playing on NYT if you wanted to play the same puzzle with all your family and friends.

https://www.theverge.com/platform/amp/2022/2/15/22934587/wor...

And it made the NYT version a two-days-ahead spoiler for any clones of the original, which was quite effective at getting whole groups of people to move instead of using clones.

Absence of proof is not proof of absence. We can have nice things on the internet. Even if Wordle got corrupted by spyware.

'This is why we can't have nice things', which is what my comment (and likely the article title) was referencing, is an idiomatic, not a literal, expression [1].

[1] https://idioms.thefreedictionary.com/this+is+why+we+can%27t+...

Sure, I'm aware. "Proof" is a too strong assertion either way.

If anything, people are proof that we can't have nice things.

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