A Note About Today’s Wordle Game | Hacker News Reader

A Note About Today’s Wordle Game

nytimes.com

24 pointsdanso47 comments

Sooo, “fetus” is a word dangerous enough that it requires a 350 word explainer article to accompany it?

Sometimes it's just not a good time for "fetus" and removing it is the easiest solution.

This was an A+ comment.

It's not dangerous, it's just bad timing. It makes it look like NYT "chose" that word because of the recent ruling and is making a political statement, even though it's totally random.

It isn't random, it's just word 333 in the list of words to use, and it's been on the list for a while.

I am surprised that they are not stating the word explicitly, only vaguely as "closely connected to a major recent news event" ("He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named" comes to mind as an association)

Edit: the wording was updated to be more constructive

They’re trying not to spoil the puzzle?

That'd be a reason to not mention the replacement word, but they could have mentioned the one they removed.

The article states that some players will still see the one they removed, which is the problematically-timed word in question.

But players who read this article will know to force-refresh to get their replacement word.

My wife was using fetus as her first guess throughout most of her pregnancy, in honor of the fetus. Baby is 1 month old now, and the first guess preference has changed. Too bad this word didn’t come earlier, she would have got it first guess!

> We’re now busy revamping Wordle’s technology so that everyone always receives the same word. We are committed to ensuring that tens of millions of people have a gratifying and consistent experience, every day.

I wonder how much longer until the NYT requires a free account to play Wordle as a way to gently nudge more players into opting for a NYT Games subscription down the road? At this point, I wouldn't mind if it meant my stats/progress were written to a database that I could access from any browser.

Ultimately, they shelled out the money and it's their game now. I think they've done a decent job with it, and am glad to have found Spelling Bee, Letter Boxed, and the Mini Crossword along the way.

In case there's a paywall for the editor's note: the tl;dr is that today's word was originally supposed to be "FETUS". Last week the NYT noticed this and made a change, but this change wouldn't propagate to all the Wordle players who still have the cached word list in their browsers.

Full text below:

It’s been just over three months since The New York Times acquired Wordle, the hugely popular puzzle created by Josh Wardle. Wordle continues to delight millions of people every day, but as we move it over to The Times’s technology, we have continued to discover challenges.

Today, for example, some users may see an outdated answer that seems closely connected to a major recent news event. This is entirely unintentional and a coincidence — today’s original answer was loaded into Wordle last year.

At New York Times Games, we take our role seriously as a place to entertain and escape, and we want Wordle to remain distinct from the news.

But because of the current Wordle technology, it can be difficult to change words that have already been loaded into the game. When we discovered last week that this particular word would be featured today, we switched it for as many solvers as possible.

You won’t receive the outdated version if you have refreshed your browser window. But we know that some people won’t do that and, as a result, will be asked to solve the outdated puzzle.

We want to emphasize that this is a very unusual circumstance. When we acquired Wordle in January, it had been built for a relatively small group of users. We’re now busy revamping Wordle’s technology so that everyone always receives the same word. We are committed to ensuring that tens of millions of people have a gratifying and consistent experience, every day.

Thank you for your patience while we work on making improvements to Wordle. We wouldn’t be here without our amazing community of solvers.

I’m a bit puzzled on why do such a thing at all, but okay.

Because the U.S. abortion debate is currently a huge news story and the NYT doesn't want Wordle to be seen as entwined in current events.

Thanks. I don't follow US non tech news and was genuinely puzzled about this.

Same reason you might want to avoid "rifle" the day after a mass school shooting. The US is in the midst of an "abortion law" crisis (undoing abortion and birth control rights in order put women "back in their place", rolling back half a century of progress), and now is not the time for the word they replaced.

That's a gross mischaracterization of what's going on. The fact is the web of tissue-thin Supreme Court decisions never should have taken the place of a law. Congress needs to get off its collective tukus and pass a law; their job as the Legislative Branch.

That they haven't done so is because they want this to be a wedge issue that drives people to go vote. The tenuous nature of privacy precedent was too useful as a political tool to be fixed.

Regardless, I do wish we'd grow thicker skins so that we don't waste time wringing our hands about ordinary words in puzzle games causing emotional trauma.

While you stick to ideals and advocate for how things should work, the reality of how things actually work is that many states as well as the federal government, independently but concerted, are setting back society for women in the US by several decades. So perhaps thicker skin can also include "not minding when someone or some company does something like this, because they understand that sometimes, words matter".

That’s about as fair as a characterisation of that debate as saying “people want to keep R vs. W because they love killing babies”. The simple difference between the sides is one thinks whatever it is that’s in the womb is a human life, the other does not. Both sides’ believe their positions are essentially rooted in compassion — one for the adult, one for (according to their understanding) the child.

What child?

And that's the problem: people who have no idea how human biology works pushing for laws that relate to human biology.

"current Wordle technology" is one of the things that made it so great -- it was /is client-side.

I understand that NYT didn't want to step in it, and it was probably a smart decision, but I'd love to live in a world where the editor chose to say, "Well, we defined that word list many months ago and it happened to come up today. The public reaction to today's Wordle simply emphasizes the fact that words, even a single word, matter."

The "we" wouldn't be The New York Times, though. The "we" was Wardle's girlfriend.

This word, in this context, should not matter. It is essentially a random word, inserted far in advance, that happens to relate to current events. The fact that it matters to anyone here is a symptom of the severe societal illness that publications like the NYT are helping to spread. How long until dictionaries and textbooks are forced to change the definition of "fetus" because it makes some people uncomfortable to admit that a human embryo becomes a fetus at nine weeks of development?

This has nothing to do with the definition of the word and everything to do with NYT not wanting to be perceived as injecting political commentary into a politically neutral product.

I understand that, and agree with putting out an editor's note about it. I just think that the second sentence in the example editor's note provided should not be necessary, and the simple explanation of what happened should be sufficient.

Hmm... on my iphone, the bookmark vanished this morning from the favorites list and it was weird. I got to the wordle homepage after googling it. I am guessing this had something to do with it.

Is that even a thing? Is there a way to force reload a bookmark?

The source code seemed extremely simple, but somehow they messed it up so it’s impossible for them to change a word in time. Am I understanding this correctly?

My reading is that changing the word in the source code is really easy, but getting everyone's browsers to use the new version instead of their old cached one is difficult.

The original implementation of Wordle was heavily optimized for reducing hosting costs and didn't have "allow changing the word list on the fly" as a requirement. As a result, the word list is cached on the client side.

The game and all of its future word list are hardcoded into the Javascript. Many users have it cached.

Crossword puzzles often refer to current events and topics, even political ones. So this is different because it’s a word related to abortion?

https://www.quordle.com/#/

Quordle’s a great alternative.

As great an alternative as a car is to a unicycle

I prefer Duotrigordle

Why does NYTimes offer a .onion site that still requires a recaptcha, loading resources from google and other 3rd parties directly?

> When we discovered last week that this particular word would be featured today, we switched it for as many solvers as possible.

Why ?

That's funny because "plant" was a solution on Earth Day, I thought that was suspicious too...

That could have been deliberately planned by Wardle well in advance. The issue wasn't so much with today's word, as the timing of it looks like it was deliberately placed recently.

He has said it was a randomized list and he played the game two - so wouldn’t know in advance

PLANT landed on Earth Day as a result of changes made to the word list after Wordle was acquired. You can compare the word lists from before and after the acquisition and see that some words were removed completely, but others were moved to be a solution on a future date.

I’m no conspiracy theorist but I suspect PLANT was deliberate.

So, which side of the debate is the word "fetus" on?

The side that makes NYT editors uncomfortable and subscribers complain, I imagine.

Seems odd to have an article about it but I don’t think the word is associated with one side or another.

so they aborted the original solution???

I'm surprised the NYT still uses a big randomized word list that was decided upon 'last year'. Why not pick Wordle words, say, one week out? It's not a ton of a work: probably less work over the course of a year than writing a single apology letter for an accidental collision that it would have prevented.

Wordle was developed by a guy for his girlfriend. Then it went viral and NYT bought it. This is what happens and I find it charming. People need to chill out.

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