Connections, April Fools’, and Emojis, Oh My! Here’s What Social Media Users Had to Say About the April 1st Installment of the Popular New York Times Puzzle Game.

On April 1^st, the day known as April Fools’ Day where many people commit to pulling pranks, making jokes, and other hijinks, many people took pause when they logged in The New York Times website to play the daily Connections game. The game which is premised around grouping 16 seemingly unrelated words into four groups of four based on some unifying theme has been a hit online for some time now thanks to the success of other word games like The New York Time’s Wordle. On Monday, however, fans of the game were thrown for a loop when they opened the day’s Connections puzzle to see 16 emojis on the board instead of the usual 16 words. This change in format, likely linked to April Fool’s Day, got users on social media talking about what the game editors had done.

Across the day of April 1^st “Connections” was mentioned 22.67 thousand times and these posts reached over 117 million social media users across all platforms, though X was far and away the most used platform for these conversations. Throughout the day there were five significant peaks in discussion at 1:00 AM, 8:00 AM, 10:00 AM, 12:00 PM, and 6 PM which are also typical times when people like to fit the puzzle into their daily routines. As more and more opened this surprise from the editors they took to social media to share their feelings. While this was a large shake up to the typical format, the sentiment of the Connections related posts was split at about 71% positive and 29% negative. Seemingly more people enjoyed this change than not. 

Some of the top themes and subthemes of these conversations include “opening up connections,” “Connections for April Fools’ Day is evil, and “hell.” While these do seem to skew negatively, as X users like to do, users took to making jokes about one of the latest trending topics.

The most frequently used emoji when discussing the day’s Connections was the small smile emoji which is often associated with the concept of “smiling through the pain” or saying things are “fine” when they are not, in fact, fine. Further, these conversations were exclusively held between social media users in the United States which makes sense as the puzzle is hosted by and American news outlet. Additionally, the users discussing the Connections were split about evenly gender wise with a slight skew towards women being more verbal. Lastly, according to Sprinklr’s data, those that can be identified as advocates, detractors, and prolific users for this conversation are all small everyday accounts, and the influencers are mainly news related accounts. Overall, this shows that not every topic discussed on social media needs to be a big headline news story picked up by countless influencers and the like online. Often times trending topics can just be by the average social media user and for the average social media user. The occasional news outlet may chime in, but the bulk of the discussion can be credited to the everyday people who use social media to be social and talk about the everyday things that happen in their lives.

Author: Ben Katarzynski