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Comment by Ansil849 | Hacker News Reader

> What's user hostile in taking words off the list? I don't really see how that impacts the experience.

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.

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Maybe it changes the difficulty, but hostile. But yeah, I know what your beef is ...

I take delight knowing that it drives racists crazy so it’s improved my user experience.

Did a lot of racists play Wordle on the NYT page? Is there a stormfront thread about it or something? I haven't really seen any news of racists being outraged by this; likely because many of the removed words are not racially-charged terms.

> Therefore experience is impacted

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 your criteria is some specific quantity instead of one around the ethics of censorship, would you likewise be OK with dictionaries removing a small percentage of words? Under the same pretense, that this removal would surely only impact .1% of those who may consult a dictionary in a meaningful (or even noticeable) way?

If anything, the fact that the censorship is hard to notice makes it all the more pernicious and harmful.

Yes, I’m fine with that.

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.

> 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'.

Yeah, I’m fine w/ the NYT’s chosen deletions. It’s their game and their rules. Wordle’s not a dictionary, it’s a game and a game’s owners get to set the rules. In this case, the acceptable words are a big part of the rules.

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