The Rise of Ritual Features: Why Platforms Are Adding Daily Puzzle Games
39 comments
·August 8, 2025LurkandComment
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.
akudha
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
vladms
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.
bluGill
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.
reactordev
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.
ajkjk
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.
jayd16
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.
jasperry
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.
lenerdenator
Don't worry. They get quite a lot of info just by you having that app installed on the device.
CharlieDigital
You are being tracked anyways.
If that's a real concern, vibe-code one and self host.
InfinityByTen
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 :)
InfinityByTen
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..
x______________
>We are escaping the woes of AI and radicalization, I guess..
reactordev
Behavior science would suggest that we all just want to be entertained.
bji9jhff
How is this different than daily crossword in newspaper?
65
Maybe it makes sense for NYT or LinkedIn, but why YouTube and Netflix need games seems like a weird product market fit.
dylan604
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.
kiru_io
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.
pkancharla
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.
v4nn4
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
OKRainbowKid
This is fun!
Talking about balance: maybe I got lucky with my guesses, but today's puzzles all seemed pretty easy.
Telemakhos
I can't seem to get pieces into the grid on iPad Safari.
Kapura
after destroying the newspaper, technology companies are now inventing the newspaper.
calebtonkinson
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.
celltalk
I have made few games myself back in the days, still some people play. Most notably https://numbword.com
gcanyon
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.
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.