Adding trackers is the expected move, when going from a hobby site to a publisher. This is something which has to be fixed systematically by proper legislation.
That's like asking what's subscriber hostile about netflix taking movies off their service. Certainly limiting choice affects user experience.
> Adding trackers is the expected move, when going from a hobby site to a publisher.
Except that the NYT loves to attack social media about their trackers. Not only does the NYT track their users, they also charge them a fee for the privilege of being tracked.
> This is something which has to be fixed systematically by proper legislation.
NYT deliberately chose to track their users and sink to the level of facebook, google, twitter, etc.
Always shocked that there are NYT defenders. I'm also shocked people waste their lives on facebook, twitter, etc also. To be fair, I guess they'd shocked by how I waste time.
This might be a candidate for worst analogy of the month. Removing words is part of the game design, the words aren't 'content'. The NYT removed words with foreign roots you might not expect ("pupal" / "agora") in an English language game, as well as several insults which players may also not expect to be in a game without an age rating ("whore" / "pussy" etc.)
If the NYT were to remove words with foreign roots, there would be a lot more words removed than just 19. So no, that's not an adequate explanation.
> several insults which players may also not expect to be in a game without an age rating
Did you know that words have multiple meanings? But not even that, but that their standards meanings may not even be insulting at all? Like the word 'bitch'.
And then there are words like "slave", which are not insults.
And it may shock you but I do indeed know that words have multiple meanings. However I'm not really sure what's so hard to understand about the fact that the NYT is going to remove most controversial ones from a word game.
The most controversial words were not removed from the game. Unless you think "slave" and "bitch" (which were both removed) are more controversial than "cunts" or "fucks", which are both in the current NYT Wordle wordbank. This has been pointed out in multiple news articles, just in case the censors reading over the word lists in the first place somehow missed them (and yet didn't miss 'agora'), so it's an open question as to why 'cunts' is OK but 'slave' or 'agora' or 'wench' are not.
The words are content. How can you say it isn't content, when the words are what you are trying to guess? Otherwise, why would you be so supportive of censoring them?
> The NYT removed words with foreign roots you might not expect ("pupal" / "agora") in an English language game
Most of the words in the english language have foreign roots. And pupal and agora are words most semi-educated people would know. This justification is worse than my bad analogy.
> as well as several insults which players may also not expect to be in a game without an age rating ("whore" / "pussy" etc.)
How is "whore or pussy" an insult when used in a game? Calling someone that would make it an insult. Otherwise, it is just a word. "oh won't you think of the children" isn't a valid argument and using children to push a political agenda has got to stop. I played scrabble as a kid and whore and pussy are in the scrabble dictionary. So is dick in case you were wondering.
If you don't see how removing words off the wordlist impacts the experience, I really can't explain it to you, it's a tautology: removing words impacts the experience precisely by removing words. Because you can no longer use the removed word in gameplay, as you could previously. Therefore experience is impacted.
> Adding trackers is the expected move
It being 'expected' has no bearing on it not being palatable and being user hostile.
This is like saying stubbing your toe on a grain of sand impacts the experience of your foot.
Yes, you are technically correct that the Wordle experience has changed, but it hasn’t changed in a meaningful (or even noticeable) way for 99.9% of Wordle players.
If anything, the fact that the censorship is hard to notice makes it all the more pernicious and harmful.
For example, there are a huge number of English-language words that aren’t in every English language dictionary. Compare British English dictionaries to American English dictionaries. Is this censorship? Yes. Am I OK with it? Absolutely.
Removing a word because it is not in use in the region the dictionary is published is much like you wouldn't necessarily expect a dictionary in Portugal to be identical to a dictionary in Brazil. It is vastly different from removing words because the words are deemed offensive. We're not talking about the NYT removing British spellings like 'fibre', but rather words like 'bitch' or 'slave'.