The Rise of Ritual Features: Why Platforms Are Adding Daily Puzzle Games | Hacker News Reader

The Rise of Ritual Features: Why Platforms Are Adding Daily Puzzle Games

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61 pointspkancharla59 comments

My locally owned coffee shop adopted hang.com as a rewards program. They have a daily wordle clone that gives three free guesses. If you don't get it in three, you have to be close to the store to unlock the last two. There's also a bingo board that is filled in when you buy a specific drink or pastry, loot boxes when you earn enough points, tasks, and most recently a candy crush clone to earn 10% off a drink.

I'll freely admit it works on me. I have changed my schedule to work from the coffee shop just because I didn't guess the word in three turns. However, if this were attached to a national chain I might be less hesitant to participate. It's kinda funny to me that a local "snooty" coffee shop has adopted the practices of the oppressors.

(less likely, more hesitant to participate) but sounds pretty dope, gotta show my coffeeshop

The whole productivity movement is turning out to be a lie:

1) With the internet you can work from home and not have to travel. Time savings.

Your company: We want you to commute in everyday and waste time.

2) Use our platform to network productively.

Also platform: Waste hours of time playing shitty games.

3) AI will save you time.

Your Company: Don't negotiate with us because you are being productive. We will replace you with AI... really some people overseas we call AI.

They're not exactly lies; being a lie would imply it was claimed to be true in the first place. Whomst among us still believes thinks that a company saying "use our platform to network productively" is an assertion of truth? It's slop (AI-generated or not): filler text that goes where the filler text goes (website copy, CEO's mouths) in order to not upset the mysterious pipeline by which ads make money magically appear. It is not functionally different from "Lorem Ipsum" text.

I think that if you expect that "movements" that promise you something, to deliver at 100%, you are in for many disappointments.

Still, it is not like nothing happens:

1) Many people I know in IT work at least partially from home, thing which would have not been possible 20 years ago.

2) I find networking in any circumstances a hit and miss and depending also on luck. Of course people try to attract you with promises, but it was the same for events/conferences/you name it.

3) AI saves many people time. Maybe it will not reduce the time by 10x (and if it does, search for another job), but it's still better than nothing. And it's not something, new for example google translate saves people time since some time already.

25 years ago my boss told me one day not to come in the next day because I was on a critical path for the next release and he didn't want me discracted by office things.

A commute is not work time so it's not what they would think of as waste.

You just like to not commute and that conflicts with the business desire. That alone is not a lie.

That is technically correct for a portion of the workforce.

And there's two simple cases outside of that:

- workers not paid hourly. If you're paid by the day or on another scale, commute time is wasted for both the company and the worker. Time is zero-sum after all, and in that case the company pays the same whatever happens.

- workers with external constraints (kids, health, public transport availability etc.). A worker will leave earlier if they need to commute to their kid's daycare or their doctor's office. Salary might be deducted, but if your workers are carrying their weight that's lost opportunities that are avoidable.

I disagree with the shitty games part. They may or may not be a waste of time, depending on the person, but games like bracket.city (which I found on HN) and NYTimes Connections are genuinely fun and enjoyable to play.

Agree with AI and commute

Ai Shrinivas has soooo many work opportunities…

The reality is, no matter how you spin it, labor marketing is labor marketing - intended to trick you into continuing to participate.

> Daily puzzles aren’t just engaging—they’re efficient, scalable, and well-aligned with key product and business goals.

Pure, grade-A LLMese. Seeing this makes me have to summon all my strength to skim to the end (having given up reading), which I did in this case because I found the subject interesting and hoped there might be something thought-provoking in the article.

Totally agree.

Would:

> Daily puzzles are engaging, efficient, scalable, and well-aligned with key product and business goals.

bring it back within the realm of human-generated PR text? Or it's too perfect? I find the perfect number of syllables to be off putting sometimes, it can feel like the uncanny valley of text.

I quit Wordle when NYT bought it and started asking me to make an account. But I started again using the app because one of my kids does it and, as the article says, it does give something to talk to people about. So far, you don't have to make an account to use the app. I'll never make an account to be tracked just to play a word game.

You are being tracked anyways.

If that's a real concern, vibe-code one and self host.

Don't worry. They get quite a lot of info just by you having that app installed on the device.

I switched to a free iOS indie game called "Word/off". It's a two-player Wordle clone where you choose a word for your friends to solve. I find stumping my friends or guessing their words more fun than solving the same Wordle word as every other NYT reader.

Unfortunately, the App Store says the game is not currently available in my country (the US). In the meantime, there is a web version of the game:

https://wordoff.app/

Thanks, but it looks like the web version doesn't let you do anything unless you sign in with Google or Facebook.

I would be curious to search up how did puzzles make it into newspapers and magazines back in the day. I have a hunch we are just repeating the same cycle again, only the platform changed :)

And just like that, I decided to ask perplexity about this, since AI is the talk of the town

> For example, during wartime or economic uncertainty, puzzles like crosswords were promoted as a way to "escape the woes of the news pages," with editors explicitly noting that readers needed diversions during stressful times. This strategy proved effective: as readers grew to expect puzzles, newspapers benefited from increased sales and more consistent readership, which in turn attracted more advertisers.

We are escaping the woes of AI and radicalization, I guess..

  >We are escaping the woes of AI and radicalization, I guess..

You sure? I started a project not 24h ago and was quick to notice advertising of suggestions on multiple LLM chat prompts with things like: "Surprise me" and "Play a quiz"..

Behavior science would suggest that we all just want to be entertained.

How is this different than daily crossword in newspaper?

Maybe it makes sense for NYT or LinkedIn, but why YouTube and Netflix need games seems like a weird product market fit.

Maybe the idea is to throw everything on the wall and see what sticks?

Sort of, it's growth at any cost. If you're saturated in organic video views and ran out of ideas how to increase that, maybe you can still glue some mobile gamers to the platform.

Any game Netflix offers will be better than the original "try to find something to watch in under 2 minutes" game. That one sucks. It takes much longer to find something that I'm interested in, and fits the available time slot I'm willing to sit through.

I’ve been watching this space for a while and built my own puzzle with Cursor. Vibe coding speeds things up, but getting the idea, difficulty balance, and UI right is still tricky. Probably depends a lot on the type of puzzle (word-based vs. object placement, etc.).

Shameless plug: https://play7fold.com

I can't seem to get pieces into the grid on iPad Safari.

Thanks for the feedback, will look into it. I have too distinct interfaces for mobile and desktop so it could be that you are stuck with the desktop one that uses click (vs touch).

It works very nicely on Safari on macOS. I think I might have had the desktop interface on iPad.

This is fun!

Talking about balance: maybe I got lucky with my guesses, but today's puzzles all seemed pretty easy.

Thanks! The difficulty is based on the number of steps taken by my solver to solve the puzzle using backtracking and force moves calculations. Humans make better guesses, so it is not just luck ;).

No blocks can be added at this point:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1RJL3dhWZvsqQAekySSlsgcMhBbH...

Android 13, Firefox + uBlock Origin.

Yes indeed. You can tap on the orange square to remove it, put the red Z on the top left corner, the yellow L next to it and complete the puzzle!

Ah. From the shape of the pieces, I was thinking was Tetris rules - you could rotate the blocks.

%$#% that $%@%. Put down the computer, go do anything else.

I’ve created a few "daily puzzle" games (e.g., [0] and [1]), and it still surprises me when I meet a random stranger who occasionally plays them. Even now, I can’t quite explain why people keep coming back to the site every day. But maybe for many, it's just a small daily ritual to distract for a few minutes.

[0] https://mathlegame.com/ [1] https://colorguesser.com/

That’s exactly what I found fascinating while researching this — the “why” seems to be part habit loop, part social cue, and part micro-reward.

Shameless self promotion for a daily audio movie quote game me and a buddy have been building :)

https://cinequote.net

Don't forget to do your LinkedIn dailies! I'm a LinkedIn F2P player; maybe they should offer premium for so many LinkedInGems.

To me the canonical example of this is meh.com. They offer one product per day, and each day there is a “meh” button. You log in, click the button, it spins and reveals a custom “meh” face tailored to the thing on offer that day. You can only click it that day —- it changes each day, no historical option —- and on the home page it shows how many days in a row you have clicked it. On your account page it shows all the ones you have clicked.

The button does nothing: no discount, no deal, nothing. And yet at the end of Meh’s first year they issued a report and said that something like seventeen people had clicked that button every day of that year. That kind of habit is huge for a site like meh.com, and they accomplished it with a silly button that does nothing but show a custom illustration.

I have made few games myself back in the days, still some people play. Most notably https://numbword.com

Not really meant as habit forming but early on in the AI buzz I thought about a picture based variant of Wordle.

Prompt AI model for a very short 2-3 word phrase that would generate an interesting image => Have the model generate 4 candidate images => Have the user guess what the original prompt the model created was based on the images

I finally got around to vibe coding it a little while ago and it's kind of fun with a new puzzle being generated each day.

https://www.promdle.com/

after destroying the newspaper, technology companies are now inventing the newspaper.

Who but anyone very late to the party and missed the afterparty still uses LinkedIn?

Love daily games. Hate their commercialization.

Farming the village...

LinkedIn tells me I have so many (ex) co-workers that play these games and I always think about the collective time wasted by all those people and close LinkedIn in disgust.

I started monitoring LinkedIn for assignments and networking opportunities. But it's just FaceBook with more AI cringe. I don't know what I hope to find anymore when I open it out of habit.

I hadn't logged in to LinkedIn for about 4 years until recently and while I'd seen/heard about the insane content that people posted, what surprised me was the stuff like puzzle games. What is this, 2000s era office worker nostalgia for solitaire on the pc?

I still play Solitaire on my computer sometimes ;-p

The market is ripe for a professional network that relies on invite only web of trust to displace the trash that is linkedin.

And once that exists, it will transition into the same thing LinkedIn did seeing how that's exactly what LinkedIn did

If you run it as a for profit entity looking to make money then yes it would. The invite-only system prevents a lot of intentional abuse.

Nobody on Linkedin is in a position to criticize how others spend their time.

Is that where the downvotes come from? People feeling criticized? If so, please criticize me. I feel weak spending time on LinkedIn or on my smartphone for that matter. I’m disgusted by my weakness when I see my weekly iOS screentime report. The struggle is real, help me make myself a better human. Criticize me.

Well if you're being serious and truly feel bad about yourself for a habit it would be better to talk to a friend, family member, or therapist to get support for changing the habit. Linkedin is worthless but no one should be made to feel bad for using a web site or for playing games.

I think you should. We make people feel bad for fleeing into drugs right? For gambling? We tell our kids it's bad.

But it's ok to get the same hits from a website that does everything in its power to keep your eyeballs glued to it? Like a slotmachine keeps you pulling that lever? Like heroine keeps you hunting for that next hit?

We're better off without it. We're better off telling each other it's bad.

You can recognize a bad behavior but berating someone or yourself for it isn't the best foundation for making positive change.

Maybe it’s just me, but I don’t think spending two minutes a day on a logic puzzle is a significant source of wasted time. Honestly, I think interacting with LinkedIn comments after playing Queens is often a much bigger waste of time.

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