Voting Station

Josh Wardle

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Computer Tech

The Resume

    Born in Wales, United Kingdom
    Software engineer
    Product manager for Reddit
    Created the online word game Wordle (2021)

Why he might be annoying:

    Wardle is a play on his last name.
    The game play of Wordle is almost identical to that of Jotto (a 1950s pen and paper game) and Lingo (a 1987 game show).
    One of the features that made Wordle go viral -- the results grid of green and yellow emoji squares -- was created by a New Zealand player and later incorporated into the game by Wardle.
    Twitter had to block an autoreply bot that would respond to Wordle posts with a spoiler of the next day's word.
    An unrelated game called Wordle! (created in 2016 for the Apple app store) was downloaded 200,000 times by confused purchasers.

Why he might not be annoying:

    He initially created Wordle as a game he and his partner, Palak Shah, could play during the COVID-19 epidemic.
    Wordle became a viral sensation: three months after he made the game public through his website, it had 300,000 daily players. Barely a week later, the number of daily players had passed two million.
    He speculated that having only one puzzle a day created a sense of scarcity, leaving players wanting more.
    The creator of Wordle! said he would donate his unexpected jackpot to charity.
    He sold Wordle to the New York Times Company 'for an undisclosed price in the low seven figures.' (January 31, 2022)
    He said about Wordle, 'It's something that encourages you to spend three minutes a day, and that's it. Like, it doesn't want any more of your time than that.'

Credit: C. Fishel


Featured in the following Annoying Collections:

Year In Review:

    In 2023, Out of 6 Votes: 50.0% Annoying
    In 2022, Out of 3 Votes: 33.33% Annoying