Which year: guess which year each photo was taken

Original Article ↗ Hacker News Discussion ↗

Overall reception & gameplay

  • Widely described as very fun and addictive; many say they’ll add it to their daily “-dle” rotation.
  • Players post scores and average years off; many land in the 2–10 year range, some as high as ~14 years off, a few near-perfect.
  • People enjoy the satisfaction of “just knowing” from subtle cues, not only from recognizing famous events.

Strategies and difficulty

  • Common heuristics: clothing, hairstyles, film/print quality, presence/absence and type of phones, smoking indoors, car/architecture styles, and event context.
  • Several rounds hinge on recognizable events (Arab Spring, London Blitz, gay marriage protests, disco era), making precise dating easier for history buffs.
  • Black‑and‑white early‑20th‑century images, especially beach/swimsuit photos, are consistently the hardest and can throw guesses off by decades.

Design, UX, and mobile issues

  • UI is praised as polished and more pleasant than some predecessors; the end-of-game global score distribution is a standout feature.
  • Complaints: laggy year slider on some iOS devices, difficulty zooming on Firefox/Android, and unintuitive full-image close (no Escape key support).
  • Share output is considered cluttered (too many metrics) and the emojis for per-photo accuracy are confusing; the “blind person” emoji is specifically called out as a poor choice.

Daily format & feature requests

  • Current mode is a single 5‑photo daily challenge. Some appreciate the wordle-style cadence; others find “come back tomorrow” frustrating and want freeplay/grind modes and multiplayer.
  • Requests include clickable logo to return home, clear “play again” or “next day” cues, per‑photo distributions, and better share text (clickable URL, different wording).

Use of AI and data concerns

  • Several users test frontier models (o3, GPT‑4o), which nearly ace the game; debate ensues over memorization (training on the same web photos) vs genuine visual reasoning.
  • Some speculate games like this could double as labeling interfaces for training “when-was-this-taken” models; others note the underlying archive already has dates.

Photo selection, history, and culture

  • Mixed feedback on very old photos: some find them frustrating and want fewer; others say they’re the most fun and want them kept, especially since they’re scored more leniently.
  • Some non‑US players note difficulty when events are strongly US‑centric.
  • Multiple commenters observe that fashion appears to have changed less since the 2000s (“stuck culture”), making recent years harder to distinguish than mid‑20th‑century decades.

Comparisons & related games

  • Frequently compared to chronophoto.app (same core idea but this has nicer UX/daily structure) and to timeguessr/WhenTaken, which also ask for location.
  • A few users link similar chronoguesing and ethnicity‑guessing games as adjacent curiosities.

Bugs and minor issues

  • Reported issues: stats page double‑counting a single game, minimum “top 2%” display, timezone confusion around when the new daily puzzle unlocks, and share dates not matching the puzzle’s actual day.