[jasonwatkinspdx]

What 3 Words makes me so angry.

There's around 5.1e14 meters squared on the surface of earth. It takes 34 bits to address this uniquely. If we use one of EFF's dice words style short word lists (6^4 words), we need 5 words to describe any point on earth with 1 meter precision.

If we use a projection like say S2 (though plenty of other options exist), these 5 word locators will show strong hierarchical locality. In any specific area for example, there's likely only 3 distinct top level words. Likewise, the last word is useful but probably unnecessary precision for "find the building" day to day use. So the middle 3 words will be sufficient to be unambiguous in most cases, and if people used this system they'll naturally become familiar with the phrases typical to their locale.

All of this can be done with an algorithm a freshman cs student can understand, with a trivial amount of reference data. It can run on any mobile device made in the last 15 years without an internet connection.

I designed a scheme like this for fun years ago, just because it was a natural outflow of some stuff I was doing with dicewords for default credentials in a consulting context, and I just find spatial subdivision structures neat.

It's hard to interpret what3word's scheme as anything but craven rent seeking. They want to keep the mapping obscure, and fundamentally sacrifice usability in the interests of this. That what3words markets this specifically as a solution for low income nations, and dupes NGOs that are not tech savvy in the service of this is utterly #$%@$#ing revolting.

Imagine trying to rent seek on selling poor people their own street addresses, if you'll let me be slightly hyperbolic.

There is no reason a scheme like this can't simply be a standard from some appropriate body, and a few open source reference implementations.

[firen777]

This comment thread is the first time I hear about w3w. It hurts my brain trying to come up a reasoning how such concept is not some kind of parody one-off project intended to be posted on HN or reddit for the lolz. Instead, it is actually being used by the emergency service?

Trying to google with the query "what3words explained site:reddit.com" gave me this r/911dispatchers post as the first result: [What3Words and why it's trash.](https://www.reddit.com/r/911dispatchers/comments/olcxdv/what...)

(Amusingly, this 10 months old post was last edited 2 days ago.)

[vjk800]

> There is no reason a scheme like this can't simply be a standard from some appropriate body, and a few open source reference implementations.

Yet no-one did this and I think that's the point here.

World is full of rent seeking in the form of stuff that is dead simple to do but no-one does without a financial incentive.

In w3w the hard part is not the system itself, but getting people to use it, which must be done because the value of the system comes from the network effect.