what3words

Raised as a usability problem by 10 people on Hacker News over 8 years (2014–2021), in 8 threads.

People raised many different problems with what3words, but no single problem has yet been raised by 3 people in 3 different months and threads.

Unreviewed issues were grouped by machine: Claude Haiku labelled each comment as a usability complaint, named what it's about and summed up the problem in a line, and a small model grouped similar problems. Nobody has checked them by hand. Expect mistakes.

The newest 8 complaints

Requires a custom app and a matching back-end, making it harder for callers to share location2021-06-01
Hard to convey three-word location over noise, and recipient lacks the app2021-05-06
Three random words give no geographic information, so locations can't be intuited2021-05-03
Can't find a search term the app accepts for a location2019-12-22
Changing one word sends you far away; words aren't hierarchical2019-08-16
Can't search from the three-word address back to a location2019-03-28
Adjacent locations have unrelated word addresses, so the names are hard to remember or reason about2019-03-28
Cookie notice covers the map until user accepts consent form2018-09-30