[omnicognate]

I don't blame him in the slightest for taking the money - I would have too - but Mr. Wardle didn't need to be compensated for his "work". He wrote it as a (beautifully crafted) bit of fun, with no desire for or expectation of payment. You couldn't wish for a clearer demonstration of the fallacy of assuming nobody will create anything unless they're "incentivised" to do so.

It wasn't work, it was play.

[imgabe]

He wrote it for one person. He didn’t ask to be the focus of millions of people’s attention. Even if that attention is mostly positive that is a lot to deal with just in the sheer volume of messages, let alone the possibility of unhinged people thinking he wants to marry them or that he’s sending them coded messages in Wordle or whatever.

Even if it's simple to host with that much traffic it's bound to be a headache. Forget to renew your SSL certificate and the site is inaccessible for 5 minutes? Great, now you've got 10,000 angry emails in your inbox.

I don’t blame him for wanting to get out of the spotlight and let someone else take the responsibility. Creating it may have been play, but keeping it going and dealing with the expectations of a huge fanbase is definitely work.

[omnicognate]

As I said I don't blame him in the slightest for selling it. Did I give the impression I did?

I'm counteracting two claims I see repeated a lot on this:

1. That he wouldn't have written it without the expectation of being paid. He did in fact do so, so that's obviously nonsense.

2. That without the NYT buying it it wouldn't have survived. It would, even if the original dev no longer wanted to be involved. Any number of people would gladly host it.

[imgabe]

I'm just counteracting the implication that running a website with millions of daily users is a simple and easy thing that someone would be happy to do for fun. I don't think that's the case. Creating a game is fun. Dealing with millions of people is not fun.