I opened up Hacker News today to find a trending website, Which Year, that shows you a photo and then you try to guess what year the photo was taken.
“Ok,” I thought, “but why so popular?”
For reference, Hacker News is a kind of link-sharing site where thousands of nerds congregate every day and upvote for the links they like best and downvote the rest.
Most links shared on Hacker news get a few dozen summed-up points, some get up to 100. Which Year, which was posted just 9 hours ago, currently has 349 points, which is by far the most of any link posted today.
I clicked through to Which Year out of idle curiosity, and it was immediately obvious to me why this simple concept has proven so popular. Right up top, it says:
“Which Year DAILY CHALLENGE”
In other words, whoever made this site took a page out of Wordle’s playbook.
While the core idea of Which Year — see picture, guess year — is fine but nothing groundbreaking, limiting how often you can play to once a day, and serving up the same puzzle to everyone in the world at the same time, immediately ups the desirability, coolness, and engagement factor of this puzzle game.
(That’s a page I’ve taken out of Wordle’s playbook myself, and applied to my Daily Email Habit service.)
Anyways, there’s clearly a marketing lesson in there, but rather than hit you over the head with that on this Easter Sunday, let’s play a game.
Today being April 20, I thought we could play a game called, Which Year, Email Edition.
Can you guess in which years the following curiosities happened?
Of course, you can get ChatGPT to answer for ya. Or you can simply wait 24 hours, when I will reveal the answers and give you a new round of puzzles. Here are your puzzles:
1. A killer swamp rabbit attacked a U.S. president (won’t say which one) while the man was trying to fish and relax
2. Nutella was first introduced in stores
3. The price of oil turned negative for the first time in history
Again, come up with your best guesses for which years these events happened, and I’ll share the answers tomorrow.
Oh, and if you want to play another daily challenge, one which isn’t just fun but can also make you money, then you can still sign up to get the next Daily Email Habit puzzle. Here’s the link: