What3Words is a Mess

W3W missed the fact that their fundamental problem is not about locations, it's about information theory and compression/redundancy trade-offs. Not necessarily from a computing standpoint, but human communication over lossy channels like a low quality phone call, or an auto-corrected text message, are subject to the same principles.

Coordinates are fairly redundant, get one number wrong and you're often still close, and digits aren't that easy to mistake for one another. Addresses are also often fairly redundant, as streets aren't named too similar, post codes may help uniquely identify residences with minimal other information (depending on region), and they're fairly "compress-able" with common words being re-used in many languages (e.g. street, avenue, strasse).

W3W on the other hand has almost zero redundancy. Plurals are an example of this, one character change will scatter the result, often far away enough to be useless, or just close enough to be confusing.