I disagree. In fact I'd say no one comes to wordle just to play a word game for 5 minutes and then forget about it. People share their solution grids all over the internet and private groups. They discuss their strategies and favorite start words. Late night hosts all play it on their shows. There's a new Wordle meme trending on Twitter every day. Heck people are so passionate about it that online backlash forced Apple to remove clones from the App Store and Twitter to remove bots that post spoilers – in under a day.
If 73% of millennials started tweeting about their bowel movements tomorrow, would you be trying to monetize the toilet as the hottest new social network?
Social media is a communication tool. What you’re seeing is evidence that normal human beings share interests and discuss them. That is not automatic evidence that the interest needs to be technologically exploited at the source. That this is not immediately clear is a significant driver behind the most reprehensible parts of the computing industry. I also think you’re overlooking that “I solved it in four! Yay!” is a mild extension of the anecdotes you’re hearing about five minutes and forget (they’re not mutually exclusive). I bet even the engineers who spent the last couple weekends solving for the optimal word are ready to put that bag down, too, and are probably just as strongly in that five minute group.
It already has a Share button that is implemented in the most respectful way possible for a user. Wordle’s backlog is precisely zero items long. Anything you’d do to it to consider social media would make it fundamentally worse. That you think it’s a social network in waiting leaves a metallic taste in my mouth and a bunch of despair for where we are.
> If 73% of millennials started tweeting about their bowel movements tomorrow, would you be trying to monetize the toilet as the hottest new social network?
This is HN, do you really want to know how that question would be answered?
> If 73% of millennials started tweeting about their bowel movements tomorrow, would you be trying to monetize the toilet as the hottest new social network?
We could, biogas digestors are a thing :-); we do plumbing is a highly paid profession and people waste enormous amounts of ressources (think of all that water we waste!) to take a crap in "the right environment" even though imo "Turkish" toilets provide a better position for bowel evacuation...
If 73% of millennials starting tweeting about their bowel movements tomorrow, would you be trying to monetize the toilet as the hottest new social network?
I told my Mom I solved last night's Wordle in two. That's making conversation about a shared interest. It's the reprehensible worst of this industry to pivot that interest into exploiting it at the source simply because it exists. Put succinctly: in no rational world is my having a conversation with someone about Wordle evidence that it needs a Sign in with Facebook button.
It already has a share button, implemented in probably the most respectful way possible. Absolutely nothing needs to be changed. Wordle is perfect user-respecting technology in any way. I'm going to go out on a limb and predict that every change you have in mind to improve it will make it significantly worse because you disagree with my assessment.
I can say that it captured my social group precisely because 1) the clipboard-based sharing works just as well in our private chat as it does on Twitter or Facebook and 2) the total lack of ads, monetization, or growth-hacking gimmicks meant that people felt comfortable sharing their results without feeling like they're spamming their friends.
I played it this way. And then I showed my wife and kids. For a few days we played over the family group chat. But now I'm on a group Messages chat with my wife's family (they are all non-techies). They all started playing it independent of us and we just got added to the group.
It's funny how it spreads... the ease of sharing results is what I think has really driven the popularity.
I wonder, for a person who was posting their Wordle solutions to Facebook, Twitter and Discord under accounts that they were trying to keep separate, how many posts it would take to uniquely identify somebody. It must be only a handful, at most.
Anyway, that's a pretty constructed scenario, but it is sorta interesting to think about.
In any case -- fortunately it is NYT, so I bet they'll happily just let it go to a nice stable daily crossword sized population and stick there indefinitely without messing it up. Maybe they can add a 6-wordle for subscribers.
A single day holds at an absolute maximum of 3^30 different combinations but in practice it's probably much less than that because people converge to more green boxes (generally) as they guess more. I'd bet by 3 days though you've provided a unique set of answers.
That's the ballpark I was thinking, too. The only wrench I can think of that might get thrown into it -- there are some known popular starters and popular guessing styles. If you go for, say, ARISE and then hunt vowels, I bet the number of collisions could be strung along a bit longer.
I mean they don't come to Wordle to do that they play wordle and go other places. I would not have played it if it wanted me to log in and link my socials or recreate my social graph to share.
When I said people don't go to wordle for a social network I mean wordle comes to whatever social grouping you already have because it's so simple and easy to share. It's not a social network it's a thing people do socially which is vastly different.
