Here's an excerpt from a longer piece I wrote about the New York Times' acquisition of Wordle, and more specifically about why some people are bummed out about it:
It sounds like Wardle is happy on numerous levels with his choice, beyond even just the money, and that's great.
On some level, though, it turns Wordle from "a cute, nice thing that a cute, nice person made" into "a bit of market leverage." And it's not that Wordle's not a cute nice thing etc, it's that so few things online these days feel... I think the word I want to use is cozy. Not just small, not just cute, but comforting, relaxing, peaceful, apart. It feels like the worst of the Internet is loud and oppressive and legion and hyper-connected, and Wordle was the opposite of those things—to the point that Wordle even made Twitter a slightly quieter, sweeter, more visually unusual place.
The disappointment that I'm hearing from others, and feeling somewhat myself, has less to do with Wardle or the Times—I won't pretend that my "real" feelings here have anything to do with, say, the NYT's gross opinion section—than with disillusionment, with that all-too-common little depressive tug of "oh, of course this is how it really is, of course this is how it happens." Of course this cozy little thing was stressing its creator the heck out. Of course its going viral wasn't actually great for him. Of course the people really making money off of this were the scum of the earth. Of course the best possible outcome here—and this was probably the best possible outcome!—is Wordle becoming the hot new New York Times franchise. And this brief dream, whether it was nostalgia for a cozier-feeling Internet or that daily remembrance of how nice it can be to have a simple, quiet joy, now coexists with this narrative where the real takeaway is that, if you have a nice, cute idea, you might get a few million dollars for it. "The value of nice and cute is seven figures."
Again, none of this has to do with Wardle or the NYT and everything to do with context collapse. It is objectively nice that the NYT paid the guy who made this instead of just shamelessly ripping it off, which it could have. Wardle should have some money. All this is good, and I don't think anyone—even the people idly speculating whether he needed to take the money to keep Wordle running—would disagree.
I was thinking about other online happenings that made me feel this way, and the stuff I came up with was a little off-kilter. Stuff like Ze Frank becoming a vice president at Buzzfeed and releasing a public statement that his employees' off-hours video content was Buzzfeed's intellectual property, or the early giddiness of Vine turning into the weirdness of influencer houses. Or—is this weird?—when a YouTuber I like goes from releasing short, sharp videos to only putting out 4-hour "video essays." It's the same emotion that I get when I have that nightmare about Jon Bois releasing NFTs.