We knew this day would come, but it still feels strange to say goodbye: the original website hosting Wordle — https://www.powerlanguage.co.uk/wordle/ — now points to its new forever home of https://www.nytimes.com/games/wordle/index.html.

Other than some small UI changes to better mesh with the clean, spacious design language of NYT's Games section, Wordle is effectively identical. In fact, if you've already played today's puzzle, you'll find the solution unchanged on the Grey Lady's domain — and if you've been a desktop solver this whole time, streaks should be retained. Strangely though, the Wordle does not yet appear on the Games landing page.

The original Wordle page does not yet redirect on mobile though, if you're hoping for one last spin. 

Wordle launched last October as a once-a-day word game in part inspired by the Times' Spelling Bee game. After obtaining massive popularity, its creator — Josh Wardle — sold his game to its spiritual progenitors for an undisclosed sum in the "low-seven figures." It's believed the game will remain free-to-play despite the change in ownership. 

Just as many of the ugliest online fights begin these days, Brian "Box" Brown, an Eisner-winning illustrator and comic artist, sent a seemingly innocuous tweet. It read, in part, "my former regular freelance employer has let me know they'll be...Embracing NFTs 🙃 so...we had to part ways." The then unnamed business, Gumroad, shot back the next day with a now-pinned response denying it had plans to enter the controversial crypto-collecting space, and has since attacked detractors from its corporate account, provided conflicting information and alienated a growing portion of the artist community it serves. How did it get so bad?

Gumroad, for the unfamiliar, is a digital goods sales platform, which hosts anything from art to ebooks to self-help courses. It was built in 2011 by then-19-year-old CEO Sahil Lavinglia, who is perhaps the only consistent figure within the company. Following a period of growth Lavinglia had to lay off staff in 2016 after failing to raise more money. The company survived, but as it is presently structured, Gumroad is something of an anomaly. The number of full-time employees, according to one the CEO's blog posts is "none. Not even me," preferring to maintain a contractor workforce. It also espouses a version of radical transparency, choosing to make its product roadmap and board meetings public. 

The image of an all-remote workplace free from deadlines or meetings belies a somewhat haphazard business. Some former workers seemingly signed no contracts beyond basic tax forms. Some contract work was compensated through Venmo. At least one of the contracts signed by Brown related to royalties and IP rights for book illustrations listed one Kun Wu Yu as the primary party, and the address as what appears to be a cancer research center in Taiwan. (When asked about this he first glibly replied that "cancer research is an important cause" and later stated he didn't recall the contract.) To say Lavinglia is not an especially careful founder might be an understatement. According to a former contractor, who we granted anonymity for fear of retaliation, "it's not the ideal work culture it appears to be."

Brown by all indications was among the permalancers filling out the ranks of Gumroad, and a busy one at that. "There was never a time in the last two years where it even slowed down" he told Engadget from the "20 plus hours per week" he billed, which he estimates became a "large portion of my daily work" and contributed around $2000 to his monthly income. Then in January, he alleges, Lavingia ceased communication. In 15 years of freelancing, he said "I never experienced a situation where a regular gig for that long suddenly just disappeared without even an email being like, 'we're gonna let you go,' you know what I mean?" He believes he was no longer assigned work because of his refusal to get involved with the company's seeming NFT ambitions. 

Once the differences in opinion between Lavinglia and Brown became open hostilities, that penchant for transparency turned into a cudgel. Both parties began posting screenshots from the company Slack (something which Brown claims to have since been removed from) which reflect uncharitably — though Gumroad has since deleted many of these tweets. 

In one, after Gumroad had ghosted him, Brown asks if there's any available illustration work, to which Lavinglia states "the one idea I have is an NFT project, unfortunately 😔" — a possible commission to help make 7,777 generative art characters. "It sounds like you need someone who is into [NFTs] from here on out," Brown says. "Yep, probably," Lavinglia responds. 

Lacking here is the context that the subject of NFTs had, according to Brown, come up repeatedly for the past six months. Each time Brown refused, though some more tactfully than others. (In another tweeted screenshot dating to September, Lavinglia pitches NFTs as an options, and Brown demurs by claimed involvement in such a scheme would cause his readership to "cancel" him.) 

The aforementioned anonymous former contractor told Engadget that "my understanding is that Gumroad was going to get into NFTs at some point in 2022/2023." Gumroad has been in the midst of a site redesign, for which it appears to have retained the services of high-powered brand manager and former Google design director Karin Soukup; in an email introducing Soukup to Brown, Lavinglia sent an email last October with the subject "Illustrations for Gumroad rebrand (+ NFTs...?)." (When asked via Twitter DM, Lavinglia wrote "Yeah, don’t recall. But the parens and ? seem pretty clear 😂." 

In his personal capacity, Lavinglia has been a minor booster for NFTs and crypto generally. He minted an NFT of his Twitter avatar and sold it on OpenSea, seemingly to Unacademy founder Guarav Munjal for the equivalent of around $3,000 USD — and pledging to split the proceeds 50/50 between himself and the artist (his own wife.) "NFT ownership is much more accessible than equity ownership," he tweeted last September, a statement only made stranger by the knowledge that Gumroad is itself financed in part by equity crowdfunding.  

It's unclear how any of these screenshots lend credence to Lavinglia's position that the company is not pursuing NFTs; conversely it seems evident that had Brown agreed to the project Gumroad most likely would be entering the crypto space. On his personal account he attempted to make a distinction between "doing an NFT collection" and "pivoting to NFTs" — later stating "we may do an NFT collection in the future, but no plans."

While an abundance of evidence suggests Gumroad is not being entirely transparent about the degree to which it's investing in some sort of NFT play, it's also not entirely clear digital tulip mania is to blame for Brown's loss of a steady gig. According to the same anonymous former contractor, there have been several similar cases in recent months. "Most of the marketing team got let go recently and it came as a surprise to all of us," they wrote. Others confirmed they were no longer working for Gumroad but declined to go into detail as to the nature of their departures. It's unclear why the company many be thinning its ranks yet again, and Lavinglia declined to comment on the matter. Gumroad's jobs page states that the company is in a hiring freeze until April. 

Employees aren't the only ones leaving Gumroad — or at least trying to. Some of those who abhor NFTs, as well as bystanders who felt the company's public spat with Brown was inappropriate, have pledged to leave the platform. However, a number of them — including Brown — found themselves unable to delete their accounts. "We found the bug around deletion, and are working to fix it now. The issue is that these users all have made money with Gumroad but haven’t been paid out yet (due to not connecting a bank account for example)," Lavinglia told Engadget, "working to allow them to delete if they wish to anyway." The bug seems to be impacting at least one creator with no outstanding monetary balance on the platform. 

Lavinglia has been about as tactful with irate users of his site as he has with his former illustrator — at one point, and in apparent contravention of California privacy laws, he cross-referenced an account's email address against the site's user information. "Never used Gumroad, never going to," Jacob van Loon tweeted. Gumroad replied "According to your bio's email address, you already have." The response was hastily deleted. Van Loon maintains that no such account was ever created.

Backlash against crypto has been a recent source of strife for a number of companies. Creators of various stripes were incensed to learn Kickstarter was a drifting into blockchain technologies; comic artist Spike Trotman to recently launched her own crowdfunding initiative in order to avoid involvement in the crypto space. Chat app Discord walked back plans to NFT and crypto integration plans last November following user backlash while Electronic Arts softened its own bullish outlook on the technology for similar reasons. A growing number of artists have voiced concerns about NFTs, in general, as a vector for theft, while the entire market for these digital goods seems, at best, wildly inflated and riddled with bad actors. These incidents have also been an opportunity for some firms to win over to skeptical creators, such as unabashed indie game marketplace Itch.io: 

But it's not just customers who companies stand to lose by stepping into this space. While Brown maintains that working for Gumroad, until recently, was an excellent gig that paid well and afforded him plenty of freedom, when asked if he'd consider working for the company again in a non-NFT context he responded with an emphatic "hell no." He considers the whole affair a breach of trust. "I'm married, I have two children, I have a mortgage, I have all kinds of bills [...] and so I need to plan for that. I can't just suddenly lose my regular gig and they don't tell me. They lost all my trust there," he said "And then when they lied online from their account on Twitter, you know, I would never work for them again, at this point. I just have no trust at all, with them. It's irrelevant whether they actually make NFTs or not, because they already made an action on NFTs by making me leave the company because I didn't want to work on that." 

Have you worked in some capacity for Gumroad? I'd like to hear from you. Download Signal messenger for iOS or Android and text me confidentially at 646 983 9846.

Wordle, the once-a-day word game that's been delighting puzzle nerds (and cluttering Twitter feeds) since launching in October of last year, has been purchased by the New York Times... reportsThe New York Times. So long, old buddy. 

The game is the brainchild of Josh Wardle and his partner Palak Shah, and once day it gives players six chances to guess a five-letter word. In an interview with the Times earlier this month, Wardle admitted that the project was inspired in part by Spelling Bee, one of the paper's subscription games which Wordle will likely appear alongside shortly. 

In part, the appeal of World was that — unlike much of the internet today — it was in now way ad- or subscription-supporter. There was no app (even though some clones attempted to capitalize on that fact.) It was, two years into a global pandemic, a rare, unalloyed good. The Times did not disclose the exact terms of the Wordle acquisition, though it stated in a press release that it paid "in the low-seven figures." We've reached out for comment on if the game will be paywalled, and if it will be enhanced with additional features now that it's under the auspices of the paper of record.

Wordle became an overnight sensation, thought it was hardly its creator's first brush with mass online fame. While employed by Reddit, he was responsible for both "Place" and "The Button," both of which garnered plenty of positive attention, though neither with the scale or staying power of Wordle, which is estimated to have millions of daily users. A bot (run by another former Reddit employee, Kevin O'Connor) tracks the number of solves that are shared to Twitter via the now-ubiquitous black, green and gold emojis. It regularly cracks 250,000 such tweets daily. 

While it's not known what the future of Wordle will be, the game has itself become a sort of template for a new variety of word puzzles, spawning a variety of offshoots that range from legitimately interesting challenges — like the two-column Dordle, the work-backwards Crosswordle or the adversarial Absurdle — to silly or absurd riffs such as Sweardle and Lewdle. Still, it's the end of an era for the game that started it all. 

Uber's rise to prominence might have been difficult to believe even as fiction, had it not been documented at every turn by ever-more concerning reports of overreach. The quasi-legal taxi business (that likely still misclassifies an enormous number of drivers) belied a toxic boys club workplace culture where just about any avenue to get ahead— including actively deceiving cops — was the norm. We're led to believe some of those things have since changed.

Of all that can be said of the company under its original CEO Travis Kalanick, it wasn't short on depravity. Incidentally, that's the sort of thing that tends to make for good TV. 

Based on the book of the same title by New York Times reporter Mike Isaac, Super Pumped puts Joseph Gordon-Levitt in the shoes of Kalanick, chronicling the taxi-hailing app on its relentless trajectory, towards (and I don't think I'm spoiling anything here) it's widespread success, a vehement public backlash and Kalanick's eventual departure. Kyle Chandler seems poised to play the foil as venture capitalist Bill Gurley, while the trailer also teases an unusual appearance for Uma Thurman as Arianna Huffington. 

The anthology series, which is set to cover a different business leader each season, is slated to premier this February 27th. So far there's no indication of which companies will be featured after this dramatization of Uber, but there's certainly no shortage of cruel, cutthroat CEOs in the world. 

Workers at JFK8, an Amazon Fulfillment Center in Staten Island, New York, have reportedly collected enough signatures to proceed with a union election vote. A National Labor Relations Board spokesperson, speaking to Reuters, confirmed that the workers had "reached a sufficient showing of interest," confirming a tweet from key organizer Chris Smalls.

That threshold of interest, incidentally, is 30 percent of a given workforce, which was likely a difficult feat given both the size of JFK8 and the nature of its round-the-clock shifts which ensure many coworkers never have cause to meet. More impressive is that this facility is seemingly being organized without the help of an established union, but instead by a new independent group endemic to this particular Fulfillment Center, calling itself the Amazon Labor Union (ALU).

ALU had previously submitted a petition for unionization, but withdrew it late last year after being informed by the NLRB that it had not collected enough signatures. 

Reached for comment, an Amazon spokesperson told Engadget "“We’re skeptical that there are a sufficient number of legitimate signatures and we’re seeking to understand how these signatures were verified. Our employees have always had a choice of whether or not to join a union, and as we saw just a few months ago, the vast majority of our team in Staten Island did not support the ALU.”

This milestone comes shortly before Amazon workers in Bessemer, Alabama are scheduled to hold a re-vote on their own union election — in that instance, under the auspices of the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union — on February 4th. A union vote took place at the facility almost exactly one year before, but the NLRB determined that Amazon had interfered in the election. 

In the case of JFK8, Amazon has until Friday to respond with its position. A hearing on the matter is slated for February 16th. 

Back in September, a slate of landmark bills successfully passed through the City Council of New York granting a variety of common sense provisions to the many delivery workers of the five boroughs. Well, the first tranche of new laws came into effect this week and crucially, they now guarantee couriers the right to use the bathrooms of restaurants. 

The lack of access to toilets has been a major point of contention for this class of workers (no doubt you've seen reports of Amazon drivers urinating in in bottles — something the company is reportedly well aware of.) The situation has been no different gig workers in NYC, and so bathroom access became a rallying cry for Los Deliveristas Unidos, a group of couriers who have been pushing for change. What was a long uphill battle resulted in a legislative win backed by progressive lawmakers in the states, and Local Law 117 — sponsored by District 2 Councilwoman Carlina Rivera — guarantees that:

"food delivery applications include a provision in contracts with restaurants requiring them to make their toilet facilities available for delivery workers’ use, as long as the delivery worker seeks to access the facilities while picking up a food or beverage order for delivery"

Why this was not already the case is a total mystery. Keep in mind that, while the pandemic has certainly put a spotlight on the working conditions of couriers, Seamless launched in New York City in 1999, and has been leveraging its own fleet of gig workers since around 2014. A law addressing the discrepancy between "working everywhere" and "being allowed to use a toilet almost nowhere" took this long to address.

Free use of restrooms isn't the only quality of life change for gig workers. Two other laws which became enforceable yesterday provide greater pay transparency. The first requires informing delivery persons of the amount each customer has tipped them on an order, while the second mandates the information related to the previous day's total pay and total tips for be shared with the courier. These also might seem like small, perhaps even obvious features one might expect to already be available in these apps. But once again, this has been a long-running issue for gig workers; both Amazon Flex and DoorDash have been forced to pay hefty settlements for using tip money to subsidize contractor wages. 

Additional provisions for couriers will go into effect near the end of April that will require companies to provide insulated bags, routing directions for accepting an order and to pay workers at least once a week. Another law will also allow delivery workers to set the maximum distance they wish to travel, and give them the freedom to avoid going over bridges or through tunnels which can sometimes be dangerous. Finally, this coming January 1st, apps will be required to pay an as-yet-to-be-determined minimum rate to couriers, similar to how the city enacted a pay floor for rideshare drivers in 2018. 

Isaiah Thomas is a 20-year-old Amazon worker at the company's Bessemer, Alabama facility, BHM1. He is also a vocal supporter of unionizing the warehouse. In a conference with press Monday evening, he described what he believed were surveillance and retaliation by his employer, solely because of his support for collective bargaining efforts. The Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union (RWDSU), which has been working to represent employees at BHM1, has filed two unfair labor practice complaints with the National Labor Relations Board over the incident. 

In a screenshot provided by the union, a letter addressed only from "BHM1 Management" to Isaiah claims the worker was "soliciting in working areas, during working associate times." The letter concedes that these activities "may have occurred during your break time" but nonetheless contends that Isaiah was "in violation" of the company's solicitation policy. 

RWDSU, however, believes this action was itself in violation of "the settlement agreement the employer recently executed with the NLRB." That agreement, which was reported late last month, pertained to several instances of Amazon impeding union activity. The union filed a separate ULP, alleging that the company or its agents "created the impression Mr. Thomas was under surveillance." Amazon has been known to hold captive audience meetings meant to discourage union interest, and after one such meeting at BHM1 wherein Isaiah allegedly questioned a "labor relations manager," RWDSU states in its ULP that "Mr. Thomas observed the employer's agents circling his work area for no other purpose than to watch him work" and later assigned him to a different area where he could be "more easily observed."   

While RWDSU have described the letter as a "reprimand" in an email to Engadget, it's unclear if it represents a formal write-up. We've reached out for comment from Amazon.

BHM1 famously became the first large Amazon facility on US soil to hold a union vote. While the vote swung heavily in favor of the cloud-and-ecommerce giant, it was challenged on procedural grounds by RWDSU. The NLRB found merit to the challenge, ruling that Amazon had, in fact, illegally interfered with the unionization vote. Ultimately the Board determined a new vote should be held. It's scheduled to take place on February 4th (though the ballot count will not begin until the end of March.) 

Amazon is, beyond is preference for a non-unionized workforce, well known for its rate of employee attrition. Seemingly, the speed at which it churns through workers would disadvantage efforts to build a cohesive bargaining unit at BHM1. According to RWDSU, the current voter list at the facility it 6,143 people, just over half of which were present for the previous vote, which took place almost exactly one year ago. 

In the US, the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is 1-800-273-8255. Crisis Text Line can be reached by texting HOME to 741741 (US), 686868 (Canada), or 85258 (UK). Wikipedia maintains a list of crisis lines for people outside of those countries.

A Connecticut mother has brought a lawsuit against Facebook and Instagram parent company Meta, as well as Snap, claiming the platforms to cause the sort of addiction her late daughter suffered prior to taking her own life at age 11 last July. 

Social media companies have been the target of various lawsuits over the years related to alleged harm to minors — oftentimes for failing to adequately prevent that harm, as in the case of teen who was bullied via an anonymous messaging app within Snapchat, leading to his eventual suicide. Tammy Rodriguez is instead making the case that the sort of "stickiness" these platforms are built to engender is inherently harmful, especially to young users like her late daughter Selena. 

Selena "struggled for more than two years with an extreme addiction to Instagram and Snapchat," the suit notes, a claim apparently backed by an outpatient therapist who had "never seen a patient as addicted to social media" during their evaluation. Although technically too young to be on either platform per their terms of service — Instagram and Snapchat state their minimum age for account creation is 13 — the mother points to the absence of parental controls, as well as the lack of strong age verification checks, which made policing her daughter's access to the services nearly impossible. "The only way for Tammy Rodriguez to effectively limit access to Defendants’ products would be to physically confiscate Selena’s internet-enabled devices," the suit claims, "which simply caused Selena to run away in order to access her social media accounts on other devices."

Use of the services, Rodriguez alleges, caused her daughter to suffer from depression, sleep deprivation, school absences, eating disorders, self-harm and led to her eventual suicide. 

Rodriguez argues that Snapchat's "unknown and changing rewards" are "akin to a slot machine but marketed toward teenage users who are even more susceptible than gambling addicts." Similarly, Instagram's design decisions "seek to exploit users’ susceptibility to persuasive design and unlimited accumulation of unpredictable and uncertain rewards," in the form of likes and followers. These features, it's argued, are highly detrimental to teen and pre-teen users whose brains are still not fully developed, particularly in the realms of "impulse control and risk evaluation."

The claim mirrors, as well as quotes from, some of the concerns voiced by whistleblower Francis Haugen. Among the tranche of documents released to news organizations by Haugen was internal research showing that Instagram might be harmful to the well-being of users, especially young girls, as well as internal documents describing the loss of of this user cohort as an “existential threat” to the business. The effects of Instagram on children's well-being is also the subject of a current investigation by a bipartisan coalition of Attorneys General.  

We've reached out to Snap and Meta for comment and will update if we hear back.

Lyft has already splashed out $14.4 million towards a likely November ballot measure in Massachusetts which would cement its drivers as contractors, rather than employees — and the vast majority of those funds were paid in a single, $13 million donation, the largest in the state's history by a considerable margin. It's an unambiguous opening salvo in what will likely be a bitter and protracted battle, the playbook for which Lyft and its gig work peers successfully tested in California two years ago. 

As the Boston Globereports, Lyft has thus far contributed the lion's share of the Flexibility and Benefits for Massachusetts Drivers committee's $17.2 million war chest, which is intended to fund the forthcoming ballot measure. The rest comes from Uber, DoorDash and Instacart owner Maplebear. The previous record for largest single donation was nearly a third the size: a $5.1 million contribution from General Motors in 2020. 

Currently Lyft and Uber are engaged in a lawsuit, filed by the Attorney General of Massachusetts, which contends that the companies have been misclassifying their driver workforce as contractors. Leveraging contractor status relieves them of many of the costs and obligations associated with employees — such as minimum wage, healthcare and overtime pay — but true contractors typically control how and when they work, and what they charge for their services. Whether or not ridershare drivers actually have that level of autonomy has become a point of legal contention in several of the states and countries in which these companies operate.

California thus far has prosecuted its defense of gig-workers-as-employees most vociferously, first through a state Supreme Court ruling in 2018, then through AB5, a successfully-passed bill that (however briefly) enshrined these kinds of drivers as employees. It went into effect on January 1, 2020 and was overturned by ballot measure Proposition 22 that November. Uber, Lyft, DoorDash, Instacart and Postmates dumped a historic $224 million into the proposition — outspending their opposition, which largely consisted of labor unions, by more than 10-to-1 — the most expensive ballot measure in California history. 

Although Prop 22 was eventually ruled unconstitutional, the strategy has thus far been successful for gig work companies. Legislative changes have been tied up in court, and nowhere in the United States are Lyft or Uber drivers currently entitled to the entire slate of benefits enjoyed by full-time employees.

In making their case for Prop 22, gig companies essentially employed two lines of attack. The first, against its own workers, was a facile attempt to tie the concept of "flexibility" to contractor status, an utterly false dichotomy perpetuated by the companies themselves. The second was to convince voters in California that the costs associated with a fleet of employee drivers would either force them to scale back service or raise prices. 

After Prop 22 passed, every single company that backed it raised prices anyway. Uber's CEO also recently contended on a call with investors that, in the face of potential employee-status regulations in the European Union, Uber can, in fact, afford to "make any model work" financially. We've reached out to Lyft to ask if it's in a similar position.

Given this much publicized bait-and-switch, it seems unlikely the Flexibility and Benefits for Massachusetts Drivers committee will be able to successfully argue the same case regarding cost to consumers. Still, the $17.2 million already amassed has paid for, as the Globe reports, a slew of big-name political consultancies who were behind what is currently the most expensive (and likely to soon the be the second-most expensive) ballot measure in Massachusetts history, which sought to stymie a right to repair law.

Are you a gig work driver or courier working in Massachusetts? Download Signal messenger for iOS or Android and text me confidentially at 646 983 9846 and let's keep in touch.

It's that time again: Netflix is raising prices for customers in the US and Canada. Monthly prices are slated to increase a buck or two, depending on your subscription tier. 

Reuters first reported that in the US, standard plans would go from $13.99 monthly up to $15.49; Netflix's own help site confirmed the change, as well as a bump to the premium tier from about $18 to $19.99 monthly. 

The change is essentially mirrored up north, where standard plans were hiked from 15.99 Canadian to 16.49. (Standard plans only cover the use of two screens simultaneously, while premium allows for up to four, as well as Ultra HD picture quality.)

If this all sounds familiar, it's because this is more or less what Netflix does every few years. An extra dollar or two was tacked on near the tail end of 2020. The same was true in January of 2019, October 2017, October 2015, May 2014, you get the idea. You start to forget that this service used to cost $8 a month a decade ago, albeit the company's original content ambitions have grown in parallel to the price, for better or worse.