[HN Gopher] Why Lichess will always be free
___________________________________________________________________
Why Lichess will always be free
Author : hydroxideOH-
Score : 1244 points
Date : 2021-04-23 03:03 UTC (19 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (lichess.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (lichess.org)
| ece wrote:
| Lichess is great and they mention FICS in one of their blog posts
| as a great way to play too:
| https://lichess.org/blog/WrbfjyYAAMOualZ5/our-favourite-open...
|
| They also mention kfchess, which I didn't know about, and other
| open source educational, puzzle, variant chess sites and the lc0
| engine based on AlphaZero.
| crazypython wrote:
| People often forget the freedom to modify or hire someone to
| modify for you is an important part of open source.
| ComodoHacker wrote:
| I can praise their stance, but one critical point left
| unaddressed is sustainability.
| paduc wrote:
| If donations are enough to pay for all costs (including a
| salary for the developer), I can't see how you could say it is
| not sustainable.
| ComodoHacker wrote:
| Yes, after rereading the article I've found this info. At
| first reading I was expecting a separate section and missed
| it.
| philliphaydon wrote:
| Wow I've never seen or heard of this site, but it's so fast!
| Navigating anywhere is basically instant for me. Really nice.
| cableclasper wrote:
| Brilliant and powerful statement. Kudos to Lichess. But this
| part:
|
| > Imagine if scientists kept the result of every scientific study
| to themselves. The same work would have to be done over and over
| again as everyone was forced to reinvent the wheel countless
| times to do anything at all. Instead, scientists share their work
| and collaborate which benefits all of us.
|
| raised my eyebrows. If only it were true. Aside from paywalled
| journals, we don't have a centralized repositories of data in
| most fields, probably because a lot of it is proprietary (or
| intends to be) in the first place.
| skoocda wrote:
| Thibaud's comment almost seems sarcastic- given the extent of
| the replication crisis [0].
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis
| eplanit wrote:
| "Would you buy a meal if the restaurant refused to tell you the
| ingredients? Would you buy a car if you weren't allowed to look
| under the hood?"
|
| Ok, but I'm not buying the website, just using it.
| vixen99 wrote:
| This was not the best of examples - 'Imagine if scientists kept
| the result of every scientific study to themselves.'. Given that
| most science is funded ultimately by taxpayers either directly or
| via money borrowed on their behalf by governments, this would be
| an indefensible position aside from demonstrating an ignorance of
| how science progresses.
| joelthelion wrote:
| Being funded by tax payers doesn't prevent most research from
| being published behind a steep paywal at no benefit for the
| researchers...
| MaxBarraclough wrote:
| The more full quote:
|
| > Imagine if scientists kept the result of every scientific
| study to themselves. The same work would have to be done over
| and over again as everyone was forced to reinvent the wheel
| countless times to do anything at all.
|
| Computer scientists do exactly this, as it's possible to
| publish while withholding your source-code. This is harmful not
| only in that effort is wasted reimplementing published
| algorithms, but also in that the reader is deprived of the
| ability to check the source-code for bugs that might impact the
| published results.
|
| This topic has cropped up before:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24261706
| cdelsolar wrote:
| I made a site heavily inspired by lichess (specifically AGPL, no
| ads ever, free forever), but for crossword board games (think
| Scrabble, Words with Friends, etc). You can see it here at
| https://woogles.io
|
| It has been growing steadily and we're about to hit 400K games
| played; it's the site of choice for the streaming community and
| we just finished hosting the World Blitz Championship this past
| week :)
|
| Thibault is sort of my hero. We've talked about doing some sort
| of cross-promotion but I'd like to polish our app a bit more
| before I follow up again.
| tux1968 wrote:
| My sister plays a lot of scrabble so I am happy to be able to
| share your site with her.
|
| If I can be so bold as to offer one criticism of your site
| though, it was a bit confusing when I first clicked to look at
| it. The first page is a barrage of information none of which
| seemed relevant for my first visit. I clicked the links at the
| top of the page and ended up on completely different web sites
| with equally confusing first pages.
|
| Eventually I did click and watch a scrabble game being played,
| which looked great!
| cdelsolar wrote:
| Appreciate the thoughts - thank you! We will pass your
| comments on to our designers :)
| porphyra wrote:
| Yes!!! Finally --- it is about time that someone made a modern
| alternative to isc.ro which is full of security problems (e.g.
| passwords stored in plaintext; your rack is randomly generated
| on the clientside) and looks ugly.
| olah_1 wrote:
| On the mobile site, I couldn't find any information on what the
| game is or how it works.
|
| Maybe add more of a header section to explain the game or have
| a picture of what it looks like in a game?
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| Presumably the owners of the trade marks you just referred to
| (Scrabble, etc.) are onboard [no pun intended!] with you?
| Otherwise I see tortuous infringement court cases in your
| future!?
|
| I thought Mattel only allowed their own online games to be
| called "Scrabble" RTM.
|
| _Disclaimer: this is personal opinion and relates in no way to
| my employment._
| cdelsolar wrote:
| We play a crossword board game named OMGWords - I only
| mentioned Scrabble, etc. to explain what I meant by a
| "crossword board game". The _rules_ of this game are
| compatible with those of the Scrabble(R) Brand Crossword
| Game.
| 0xffff2 wrote:
| >Disclaimer: this is personal opinion and relates in no way
| to my employment.
|
| I see this quite a bit on HN and I always thing it's silly,
| but this time it's particularly perplexing. Are you a lawyer
| for Mattel or something?
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| I somehow knew someone would ask and mentally prepared a
| response!
|
| My employer thinks I shouldn't comment on social media at
| all because people might think I'm commenting in an
| official capacity. Their line is "don't use social media",
| so if there's a comment where an argument could be leveled
| against me that "people think this is a part of your
| employment" I indemnify myself against that argument.
|
| It's not unlike acknowledging the owner of a trademark, no-
| one can soundly claim people would think you own a mark if
| you point out you don't and name who does.
|
| I don't work for Mattel, fwiw.
| roofwellhams wrote:
| Why you don't create a new account that's not related to
| you or your company?
| kixiQu wrote:
| It's not silly only in proportion to your employer's
| aggression on the topic.
|
| Perhaps there needs to be an account disclaimer checkbox as
| a standard feature: "I speak in no official capacity
| related to any employer or professional role"....
| 0xffff2 wrote:
| It's silly because most employers have no ability to
| match "0xffff2" or "pbhjpbhj" or "kixiQu". To a person in
| the real world.
|
| I've never identified myself as an employee of my company
| on this account and I'm certainly not identifying myself
| as an employee of my company in this post, so since I
| don't work for the NSA, I post whatever I want, no
| disclaimer necessary.
|
| If for some reason I did want to identify my employer
| sometimes, it would make infinitely more sense to make a
| separate account for those times than to attach a
| meaningless boilerplate disclaimer to every single post I
| make on Hackernews.
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| I'm pretty confident I _could_ be doxxed (email me if you
| like!), I don 't really want to play the game of proper
| anonymity (throwaway on Tor-Browser over an sshuttle
| "tunnel" is about as far as I'd go but that would be
| getting pretty silly; hopefully it'll never happen, if it
| does I hope my disclaimer will be enough to argue unfair
| dismissal; who knows.
| chucksmash wrote:
| It'll still be silly then, it'll just be technologically
| enshrined silliness!
|
| I work at a company with a social media policy. My
| understanding of it (garnered by clicking through the
| slides as quickly as humanly possible once a year) is
| that they only want me to consider these sorts of
| disclosures if I'm speaking in a capacity where people
| MIGHT mistake what I say as coming from the company.
|
| My employer is certainly discoverable from my HN account
| but there's no more value in me adding such boilerplate
| to my HN posts than there is me signing emails with my
| mom the same way.
| zestros wrote:
| Any plans to allow the use of your site without a login? I'd
| like to play with my family but getting them all to create an
| account would be too difficult.
| cdelsolar wrote:
| We have heard this a few times, and the backend supports it,
| but we need to make a few changes in the front end to make it
| happen. I think we'd like to do this in the future.
| bspammer wrote:
| This is brilliant, just being able to spectate high ELO
| scrabble games is unreasonably entertaining. The kind of words
| these people come up with is crazy.
|
| I know lichess invests a lot of energy into catching cheaters,
| is that something you've had to look into? I imagine it's much
| harder to catch cheaters than in chess.
| cdelsolar wrote:
| Yes, we actually have come up with some algorithms for
| flagging cheaters, and then a small team of experts reviews
| the games in question. The algorithms are the only part of
| the site that is closed source at the moment; if we move over
| to machine learning we may open them (I think of something
| like Irwin).
|
| The algorithms have been successful at catching a nontrivial
| number of cheaters already, most of whom have admitted it and
| gotten their account back after a suspension.
|
| It is a super cool problem - I think we can catch more with
| machine learning (the funny thing is, my day job is in fraud
| detection using machine learning, so there is some overlap :)
| [deleted]
| earthscienceman wrote:
| I wish you the absolute best of luck. If this notion/method of
| operating community platforms takes off, the world will be far
| better for it. Imagine if the average human's interaction with
| the internet were open free (both as in beer and as in
| idealistically) platforms that encouraged social collaboration,
| personal interaction, and community formation. Wikipedia,
| Lichess... maybe woogles. It could easily be an impetus for
| social change in the meat-flesh world. Even more powerful if it
| seeps into "real" social media platforms. It sounds like a
| revival and reformation of the diverse community diasporas
| around during web 1.0.
|
| ... so much better than the vision for the future coming from
| the powerful technocrats living in silicon valley, the primary
| users of HackerNews. The future is for the people.
| dang wrote:
| > the powerful technocrats living in silicon valley, the
| primary users of HackerNews.
|
| That's a serious misperception. Only about 10% of HN users
| were anywhere near SV, last I checked, and the vast majority
| of those aren't "powerful technocrats".
|
| I frequently see comments like this setting up (or
| expressing) barriers between the commenter and the rest of
| the community, when the truth is that the community is mostly
| just like themselves. I think it's important to realize this.
| How can we function as a community if people are suspecting
| and/or putting down everybody else who's here?
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| earthscienceman wrote:
| Hi dang, thank you for taking the time to point that out. I
| think you are touching on something that's important to
| understand and overcome. I realized that my wording was
| poor as I thought more about my comment and you are correct
| to call me out. I'll try to be as honest/open/guidelined in
| my response as possible to bare fruit from an aggressive
| comment.
|
| While it might be true that the demographics of the site
| are 10% SV residents, I do sense a very existent divide
| here in the interests of the users of this site. And while
| my initial comment might not have perfectly followed the
| guidelines, I do often think it's important to push-back
| against the "money-above-all" culture that often steers
| this website, or at least the culture that underpins a lot
| of the discussions.
|
| I think, as the site is founded by a VC firm, there is
| inherently a large subset of users that are money driven
| technocrats. And more substantially, I think the resulting
| culture _is_ a barrier to the actual substance of
| discussions here and to the impact of discussions
| /technology/startups/VCs/etc in general. And I broadly
| disagree with the perspective on community, society, money,
| and finance that the founders of YCombinator espouse. Views
| that are also shared by a portion of the user-base here.
|
| Let me label these two communities that I believe there is
| a barrier between: "FOSS-ers" and "startup-ers". I hope
| these labels are transparent enough that I don't even need
| to clearly define them. Thus, what I think that I'm trying
| to comment on, is that there is a real divide between these
| communities. Is there common ground? Absolutely. Am I
| willing to tolerate the "wealth-at-all costs" attitude that
| is pervasive here? Absolutely not. I think it's toxic and
| damaging to civil society and I think we're bearing that
| out _at this exact moment in time_. And I see HackerNews as
| an awkward, sometimes beautiful, ground-zero.
|
| Now, to be expressly clear with my position: I'm not anti-
| capitalism. I wouldn't even call myself a socialist. After
| all "socialism", as the word is colloquially used in the
| Anglo world (aka European EU-style socialism), is really
| just capitalism where some of the taxes are expressly
| earmarked for broad reaching social programs. I believe in
| competition and I believe in providing rewards to the
| people who are willing to take risks and create things in
| the world. I think that's fantastic.
|
| But I am suspicious of some users here. I think the actions
| of many VC firms, YC startups and their founders, and the
| resulting discussions on HN, border very often on anti-
| social. I don't believe Paul Graham's hypothesis that large
| sums of wealth aggregated via consumer capitalism is best
| used by VCs to create good in the world. It's typically
| used to acquire more wealth via blind consumer-oriented
| companies, with the occasional benevolent passion project.
| That wealth in the hands of a sufficiently/correctly
| motivated government, an institution created to serve the
| people, would create far more good and is a much better
| place for that money.
|
| I quite plainly believe that much more good would be
| created in the world using technology if these people had
| stricter morals, less money, and less selfish goals. I also
| believe that their wealth is inherently oppressive, as it
| bequeaths power to be even more selfish... and motivates
| others to follow suit. Something I think should be
| discussed here on this website.
|
| --------------
|
| Now, I know that I'm riding the lines of the comment
| guidelines here. I know that this is pretty close to an
| ideological battle. But I hope that I'm closer to "curious
| thoughtful and substantive conversation" about ideologies
| on HN than I am to fulminating. I suppose I'll find out in
| your response.
|
| Thanks for all your effort here dang.
| granshaw wrote:
| Interesting that you've had no replies yet
|
| I actually feel like there's a lot less readers from the
| VC/entrepreneurship crowd on HN than in the early days
| (or maybe they were never a big percentage to begin with)
|
| Feels to me like by far most of the readership here is
| your typical 9-5 salaried tech worker who has never
| engaged in entrepreneurship nor has any desire to
|
| Granted within that group there might be a lot in the "VC
| camp" that glamorize VC/startup culture and values
| dang wrote:
| Sure, HN has subgroups like FOSS-ers and startup-ers (I
| think those are fair names). Another I'd mention are the
| internet mavens, the connoisseurs of online communities
| who think a lot about them and know about their history.
| I think the boostrapping/indiehacker subgroup is distinct
| from all of these again. And there are others. All are
| welcome here--beyond welcome: they all make incredibly
| valuable contributions.
|
| > I know that this is pretty close to an ideological
| battle. But I hope that I'm closer to "curious thoughtful
| and substantive conversation" about ideologies on HN than
| I am to fulminating.
|
| I agree! I'd avoid rhetoric like "The future is for the
| people" though - internet forums like HN are just not
| good places for declaiming. It comes across as blaring,
| sort of like using a megaphone in a living room. But the
| reason I replied above was not because of any of that. It
| was because of "the powerful technocrats living in
| silicon valley, the primary users of HackerNews" and
| especially the word "primary". That is empirically deeply
| inaccurate and I think it's part of my job to help this
| community get a more accurate reflection of itself. So
| many commenters feel like they have to distance
| themselves from the rest of the community--or rather,
| from their _image_ of the rest of the community.
| Sometimes this comes across as supercilious, sometimes as
| defensive, but it 's the same underlying phenomenon. I
| think it's a large, significant problem that we need to
| work on in order for HN to be the kind of place we'd all
| prefer.
|
| Btw I wrote about that here last year, if anyone is
| interested:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23308098.
| earthscienceman wrote:
| Thanks for the link, I'll read it this evening.
|
| I appreciate the correction of primary, I agree it's an
| unnecessary broad characterization. I also understand
| your concern with the "distancing" you're referring to,
| however:
|
| I think there's a subtle line between being willing to
| engage with someone the way you speak of and tolerating
| behavior that is socially toxic. If there's something I
| feel like has been learned over the last 30 years, it's
| that some portion of the population (the term
| "privileged" is often used here) are enabled by society
| to be deaf in their actions and the impacts of those
| actions on others. Whether the "privilege" causing their
| deafness be power that is rooted in money, race, or
| simply being member of a majority in some sense... the
| impact is the same. They need to be hit over the head
| with the mirror of what they are creating and, yes,
| sometimes that action is a bit emotionally violent. Or,
| in your language, sometimes that requires creating a
| characterization/image of their actions which can
| sometimes look similar to what you are calling
| distancing. I think the unfortunate simple difference
| between being unnecessarily divisive in your commentary
| (which I think is a summary of what you're asserting I've
| done) and calling people out for their bad behavior... is
| simply whether your characterization of their behavior is
| accurate or not. I hope I'm being fair and accurate and I
| think you've done a good job in pointing out the ways I
| was not.
| hooande wrote:
| I think part of what dang was saying is that there is
| generally no need to characterize the motivations and
| beliefs of your fellow posters. Your comment would have
| been fine without that. Meta discussion about the
| community itself can be valuable. But this post is about
| lichess and the merits of ad driven revenue models.
|
| It's also worth saying that most of the people here are
| developers, academics and general nerds. You might want
| to pay more attention to the replies on the major posts
| to get an idea of where people are coming from. You might
| also benefit from a closer reading of what the current
| leadership of YCombinator have said recently. Lot of
| sustainability and basic income there.
|
| It looks like you've created a straw man that you hate
| very much. It's like trying to blame all of "America" for
| the perceived evils of capitalism. The entire hackernews
| community is too big and too diverse to be your opponent
| in that debate.
| earthscienceman wrote:
| I'll try to keep my reply short.
|
| I read a lot of the conversation here every day and I've
| read a lot of the statements from the current leadership
| of YCombinator. And I think it's a gross attempt to
| undermine the discussion by asserting that I must not
| read anything because I could only be so wrong if that
| were true.
|
| While I understand your comment that HN is a diverse
| site, and you are very correct there, I am not trying to
| make all of HN my opponent in this debate. I'm very
| plainly, although maybe I did poorly, hoping to make an
| opponent of a specific -- and in my opinion very common
| -- mindset on HN. With the goal of deconstructing it and
| ideally maybe even dismantling it.
|
| To that end, I don't agree at all the YC leadership is
| doing a meaningful job of actually addressing
| sustainability via their practices as a business. I have
| read the words that you're referring to, which IMO are
| aimed at _discussing_ sustainability. However, their
| practices are in direct opposition to those ideas. The
| startups they fund, the businesses they push to IPOs, and
| the monologues that they write on their blogs are far-
| more-often-than-not geared toward one goal: making money
| and expanding YC and the reach of tech related
| businesses, IMO without much regard for the impact it has
| on the world. I recognize that this is an opinion, and
| you pretty obviously aren 't sympathetic to it, but it's
| fairly empirical in terms of substantive projects that YC
| has pushed hardest financially/philosophically. It's also
| empirical in terms of the replies on major posts,
| particularly the entrepreneurial ones.
|
| And because you've implied this is off topic on a post
| about lichess, I should also clarify: I see the goals and
| accomplishments of lichess to be worth even more when
| juxtaposed against these YC culture. Especially knowing
| that someone like ornicar faced a very real choice when
| deciding to pursue lichess as his primary endeavor. I
| think he deserves to be applauded not only on his own,
| but also in that context. I also think it's no
| coincidence he is from France. Les francais sont beaucoup
| plus a l'aise dans l'idealisme, il me semble.... surtout
| par rapport aux americains. Mais pourtant ca sert aussi a
| creer son propre ensemble de "problemes uniquement
| francais"
| fragmede wrote:
| Have there been any posts doing analysis of the
| demographics of this site? And if not, could a data
| scientist come in, visiting professor style, and do one? I
| think it would be fascinating!
|
| (link just goes to guidelines site which does not discuss
| demographics)
| ridiculous_fish wrote:
| There is Wikipedia, then lichess. Thank you.
| xorfish wrote:
| I would add https://ourworldindata.org to that list
| dagurp wrote:
| The first thing I notice on this site is a banner telling me
| that I will be tracked unless I opt out. This isn't even GDPR
| compliant.
| sampo wrote:
| > This isn't even GDPR compliant.
|
| Our World in Data in run by Oxford University, so outside
| of EU. The applicability of EU GDPR laws outside EU is a
| complicated topic.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Data_Protection_Regul
| a...
| kjakm wrote:
| Although the GDPR is an EU Regulation it is incorporated
| into UK law and that hasn't changed since Brexit.
|
| https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/dp-at-the-end-of-
| the-tr...
| lavp wrote:
| Lichess is truly on a class of its own. It delivers a better
| service than any of it's alternatives (in my opinion), and it's
| actually 100% free with no BS.
|
| Funny enough, I've donated around $30 in total which is $30 more
| than I would've ever thought of spending on a chess site. Hats
| off to thibault and the open source community for creating such a
| wonderful gem.
| ycombinete wrote:
| I donate a tiny $5 a month. Not bad for a service I use
| everyday.
|
| Another way to help is to host an analysis server[0]. I give
| them one core of my old i3-5100. It's easy to setup, and I like
| knowing that it's chugging away 24/7.
|
| [0] https://github.com/niklasf/fishnet
| chengiz wrote:
| In case you're using paypal, it seems paypal takes 9% of that
| $5, see their costs spreadsheet posted elsewhere here. If you
| can, try donating bigger amounts less frequently. The fee
| goes down to 3% at ~$60.
| alisonkisk wrote:
| Donate annually or one lifetime gift do the money goes to the
| recipient instead of the finance industry.
| heinrichhartman wrote:
| Just donated $30 myself. I use this site every week. It's such
| a great product!
|
| Here is the direct link: https://lichess.org/patron
|
| PS: I also donated a few month of CPU time to fuel their Game
| Analytics a while ago: https://lichess.org/help/contribute
| loevborg wrote:
| Just donated $50 - after 2500 blitz games, that's only 2 cents
| a game.
| dav43 wrote:
| Likewise, I found myself donating because - for me - it's
| generated great value.
| oytis wrote:
| Would be great to have a search engine or a registry board for
| non-monetized subset of web.
| 29athrowaway wrote:
| There are forks of lichess for other games.
|
| - lidraughts.org
|
| - lishogi.org
| Ecco wrote:
| I read that as "Why Lichees will always be free". That would have
| been fun :-)
| a_lieb wrote:
| Here's a business model for successful open-source projects--one
| that's already in use, but I think is rarely seen as a business
| model per se. I'd be interested to see if there's a blog post or
| the like about this already.
|
| If you're the head of a successful OSS project and you believe
| it's helping your career in the way of industry notoriety, good
| demo work to show potential employers, etc.--then give a cut to
| cover the project's expenses, or even hire folks for freelance
| work.
|
| There might be stretches when you're not going to make any extra
| money from the project; say you've reached the point where the
| project isn't a top line-item in your resume and is probably not
| responsible for your next salary bump. You can still honor what
| you've gotten from the project by voluntarily investing back a
| portion of the money. It has a "benefit corporation" flavor.
|
| If this sounds like too much generosity to expect of people,
| consider people like Thibault. He's very, very deep into the
| "generous" side, in that pretty clearly he could work on the
| project _far_ less and still get a dream job. What I'm describing
| is a way to make an overall _profit_ and still feel like you 're
| giving back to the world by nurturing the project you've built.
|
| Obviously, this is an overwhelmingly common thing in practice
| already, whether it's someone who made an OSS project to get a
| good job and then continued to work in their spare time to
| maintain it, or language BDFLs who maintain the project on a
| volunteer basis, but as a result of founding the language they
| have amazing and well-paying day jobs. But so far I've never seen
| it described as an actual _business model_ , where you can feel
| great about helping to keep up your project, but still come out
| ahead overall.
| blastro wrote:
| can't say enough good things about lichess. we almost don't
| deserve it!
| kohlerm wrote:
| Great post, especially being open about the costs is great
| information. Lichess is amazing!
| rektide wrote:
| Damn liches, we just can't stop em.
| Jeff_Brown wrote:
| Why we can't make this unfree, or why it would never be in our
| interest to make this unfree, are a lot more convincing than why
| we promise this will always be free.
| luke2m wrote:
| Lichess is one of those examples where the open source
| alternative is actually the best and most well known.
| V-2 wrote:
| I do prefer lichess, but is it "most well known"? If we measure
| it by the number of users (what else), chess.com dwarfs it
| really.
| luke2m wrote:
| At my school anyway
| ipaddr wrote:
| The most well known products are the ones with the biggest
| marketing budget. In order to get that marketing budget they
| have to extract value from each user.
| Eduard wrote:
| Is this a chess website?
|
| Nothing in the news nor the interface mentioned chess.
| [deleted]
| Hammershaft wrote:
| I just wish Lichess had more accurate ratings
| matsemann wrote:
| What do you mean by "accurate"? Compared to chess.com? FIDE?
| USCF? It really makes no sense comparing ratings between
| different pools. None of them are more accurate, they are just
| different.
| rgoulter wrote:
| https://lichess.org/page/rating-systems
|
| Yes, ratings can't be compared between different pools.
| Different rating systems can perform with different accuracy,
| though:
|
| _Which rating system is best?_
|
| _The purpose of rating systems is to predict the outcome of
| games._ _Therefore, they can be objectively better or worse,
| according to their ability to make such predictions._ _Glicko
| 1 makes better predictions than Elo, and Glicko 2 makes
| better predictions than Glicko 1_
| Hammershaft wrote:
| 'accurate' is definitely the wrong term. I just meant I
| wished Lichess ratings translated more accurately to FIDE
| ratings.
| V-2 wrote:
| It's not really feasible though:
|
| * Online chess typically uses Glicko ratings (this applies
| to Lichess and chess.com alike), FIDE ratings are based on
| Elo
|
| * Online ratings are typically blitz ratings - people tend
| to play fast games online. Obviously FIDE has blitz ratings
| too, but over the board chess is mostly standard time
| control, and that's what's typically referred to as a FIDE
| rating. A lot of people with standard FIDE rating don't
| even have a blitz one, because OTB blitz tournaments are
| arguably rare.
| sethbannon wrote:
| Lichess is such an inspiring demonstration of what talented
| enthusiasts can build, even when driven not by profit but by
| simple passion. You can feel the craftsmanship and the love of
| chess in the app and in the speed of iteration. We could use more
| of this in the world.
| teachingassist wrote:
| If Lichess is a French Charitable Association, why do its (very
| clear) terms say that we agree to follow the laws of England and
| Wales?
|
| https://lichess.org/terms-of-service
|
| This seems rather an odd arrangement. Does anyone have any
| insight here?
| brainwad wrote:
| Because English contract law has a reputation for reliability,
| thanks to the common law doctrine of stare decisis, which binds
| courts to decide the same way as previous cases with the same
| facts were decided (modulo appeals courts). French law, by
| contrast, gives much more freedom to judges to decide each case
| individually, which sounds nice in theory, but in practice just
| creates legal uncertainty for everyone involved.
|
| As to why English law, and not, say, New York or New South
| Wales law, well: England is only 21 miles from France.
| teachingassist wrote:
| Is this a standard arrangement, then?
|
| Is it usual for French organisations to apply English law?
| codethief wrote:
| > but in practice just creates legal uncertainty for everyone
| involved.
|
| Citation needed. Both civil law and common law seem to have
| their respective pros and cons. At least my understanding of
| common law is that in common law you need to be familiar with
| all past related cases dating back to who knows when, which
| doesn't exactly make interpreting and understanding the terms
| of a contract any easier.
| sixstringtheory wrote:
| It seems common sense enough that no citation is required.
|
| Get a judge having a bad day in France and your case could
| go belly up regardless of merits, customs or precedent.
|
| "Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat
| it." So why retread the same legal wheel over and over? Why
| not study prior similar cases to at least see if they
| thought of something you didn't?
| almavi wrote:
| Good question!
| kissgyorgy wrote:
| Sure this is a very nice cause, but if you don't have proper
| revenue, you can't pay UX designers to make something more people
| could use. Explains why Lichess is straight up ugly and the
| interface is just messy.
| sellyme wrote:
| Lichess makes fantastic use of the screen space available,
| works excellently on all manners of devices, has a native
| darkmode, and puts the most relevant content front-and-center
| instead of designing around revenue generation first and
| functionality second.
|
| Just because damn-near every other website on the internet is
| comprised entirely of gradients and parallax scrolling doesn't
| mean any that doesn't is "ugly".
| ratww wrote:
| You couldn't be more wrong.
|
| Newspaper websites are full of advertisement and probably the
| worst sites in terms of UX in the internet. Even if you hide
| the ads, there's still the constant clickbait and autoplaying
| videos. Same for paid-by-ad blogs that just use default themes
| (with notable exceptions like Daring Fireball). Same for any
| file hosts that doesn't have a freemium model (compare, for
| example, Mediafire vs Dropbox).
|
| On the other hand, services that offer recurring signatures
| mostly often have better UX.
| [deleted]
| user48a wrote:
| I don't think it is fair to claim that "Lichess is straight up
| ugly and the interface is just messy" in such absolute terms.
| While this might be your opinion, I for one like their design a
| lot and think it's very clean!! (and prefer it to alternative
| chess websites)...
| eeegnu wrote:
| There are also open source browser extensions for restyling
| lichess: https://prettierlichess.github.io/
| neatze wrote:
| You making interesting point, with for profit model you can
| provide better service then with non-profit model to some
| degree, but it is not always true. There many reasons for such
| cases, but I think it all comes down to leadership and values
| of the company, over time leadership and consequently values
| will change, undoubtedly. Such changes result in higher or
| lower preference of service to end users versus profits (or
| innovation, control priorities), I think this is irrespective
| of for/non-profit organizations.
| eloisant wrote:
| Thibault Duplessis is actually an ex co-worker of mine, and this
| guy is truly impressive.
|
| Not only he is a very talented developer, he really sticks to his
| beliefs and made what Lichess is today.
|
| He used to take up a job for a year or so, save money, and travel
| the world for a year or so until money runs out. Then he would
| come back to France and take up a new job. All working on Lichess
| during his free time.
|
| For a few years now he has enough donation to pay himself enough
| money for his expenses, while he could have been a startup
| millionaire if he had decided to take a different path.
|
| But he proved that you can have a successful non-profit, free of
| charge, free from ads service. Not just source code, but an
| actual service hosted with millions of users.
|
| We need more people like Thibault.
| CyberRabbi wrote:
| Do you know how many children he has? That would be the easiest
| way of getting more people like him.
| SamPatt wrote:
| I understand your point, but children are not guaranteed to
| be like their parents, and many gifted people are actually
| poor parents.
| CyberRabbi wrote:
| In general children are more likely to be like their
| parents than non-children. That's the rule, of course there
| are exceptions.
| ArtWomb wrote:
| I can think of no better compliment: Lichess is the site, the
| eternal game of chess deserves.
| huevosabio wrote:
| Lichess is _impressive_ in itself. I was blown away when I
| found it was FOSS. Kudos to Thibault.
| kome wrote:
| I love absolutely everything about this. Thank you for sharing
| his story.
|
| Free/Libre software has been built thanks to principled people
| like him. It's truly a collective effort. And corporations
| started to slowly eroding it from within.
| beebmam wrote:
| A way to have more people like Thibault is to make it so the
| cost of living is extremely cheap, if not totally guaranteed. A
| society creates its people.
| medium_burrito wrote:
| Yeah, a Portland or Berlin where one can retire young with
| low cost of living and do cool stuff...
| reedjosh wrote:
| /s ?
| mey wrote:
| As someone living in Portland metro right now, either
| it's /s or misinformed. Portland hasn't been cheap since
| maybe 2010, maybe earlier depending on your definition.
| It may be cheaper than San Francisco, but certainly not
| cheap.
| fersho311 wrote:
| What an inspiration! I'm doing more or less the same with
| c0d3.com
|
| Been working on the learning community for about 5 years now.
|
| I've saved up enough for a year, will be quitting In 2 weeks to
| go back to teaching and improving the experience and teach more
| students about good engineering practices.
| phoinix wrote:
| He may as well be a millionaire in the future. By having a
| platform that people use you do get a minimal amount of bug
| fixing and stability of the platform. Lichess is a platform for
| companies to use it for their purposes with some tweaks here
| and there it can be an education platform, a platform for
| engineers to practice the internals of machines and many more
| possibilities.
|
| Joomla is open source and their devs make so much money selling
| plugins and widgets. Who is the best man for the job to tweak
| the platform than the developers who made the open source core
| of it?
|
| I use lichess everyday for years, the stability of the platform
| is absolutely top notch. An absolute minimal amount of bugs, no
| glitches in the website, every page i click on, loads
| instantaneously. The commercial website Chess24 and closed
| source, doesn't have "ultrabullet' games, very quick games of
| 15 seconds, because their platform cannot support it. lol
| aaronax wrote:
| I think the "plugins and widgets" path to making money easily
| ends up being detrimental to the original free thing. Instead
| of spending time just improving the thing, one ends up
| carefully planning out what can acceptably be broken out
| separately, how to make the thing extensible, billing,
| advertising, funneling...just all kinds of garbage.
|
| Eventually you end up with a load of staff who are dependent
| on the thing for their livelihoods, and that influences
| decision-making. Next up is selling to a company with big
| resources "to empower us to complete the original vision" and
| soon after a new scrappy upstart releases their free
| alternative, to start the cycle again.
| phoinix wrote:
| Very true, the vision of the system may alter a little bit,
| if in the future there are commercial sponsors. Every new
| version will have to be more conservative, so as not to
| break compatibility, development will slow down, more
| bureuocracy etc.
|
| I think the future of education is portraying it as a game,
| history as a game, engineering as game etc and solving
| puzzles along the way. Lichess as a platform may be useful
| in that regard, because a game to be enjoyable doesn't need
| to have all the fancy 3d graphics.
| 9387367 wrote:
| Would be interesting to see how much money the people here saying
| Lichess shouldn't be free or should serve ads, have actually
| donated to Lichess if they use the site and are so concerned with
| their sustainability.
|
| Lichess has been live for over a decade, they are a proven
| success.
| roofwellhams wrote:
| I didn't know what is lichess but looks amazing!
| jek0 wrote:
| > So why are there ads on websites? There is only one purpose
| they serve: to make money.
|
| If there are things that could make Lichess way better but
| require resource they don't have, they should weight the pros and
| cons.
|
| The cost is a worst user experience. The benefit is money.
|
| For a non-profit, money is a mean and not an end. Resource will
| be used to achieve a purpose. Maybe in some cases the benefit can
| outweigth the cost.
| greyman wrote:
| I like lichess, it is my first go to website to play chess, but
| for-profit models also have their advantages. For example in
| chess.com, they pay grandmasters to be there, and one can learn a
| lot from grandmasters. They earn money, and invest them back so
| the site can be even better. So I think neither model is wrong,
| or inherently better than the other.
| [deleted]
| almavi wrote:
| You almost sound like the world champion don't usually play on
| Lichess.
| gokhan wrote:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WQ6prlKz3aQ
|
| Carlsen, on Lichess, against other GMs and FMs.
| krisgenre wrote:
| I love lichess but before that (in mid 2000's) used to spend a
| lot of time on freechess.org. Not sure how popular it is now.
| yesenadam wrote:
| I think you mean FICS (Free Internet Chess Server)! It started
| in 1995 I think. I started there too about 2007. It's still
| going, I visited a few months ago. A bit sleepier than it was.
| That was the place to follow the moves of live tournaments and
| discuss the games, before the age of live video broadcasts of
| tournaments. I loved it so much. Channel 23 was for quacking
| only etc hehe. Also I mainly played slower games (10 10 or 5
| 14) and chatted with a lot of the people I played, must have
| met people from almost every country in the world. I haven't
| found other sites nearly so friendly.
| krisgenre wrote:
| Yes. I mostly played 2 12. The place felt like IRC for chess,
| you had to type commands like 'seek 2 12' for a new game and
| you needed some desktop client like winboard/xboard to play.
|
| Edit: Just played a game, my ID was still active and my last
| game was in 2012!
| boatsie wrote:
| I love the sentiment but you often see these promises broken, so
| I won't hold my breath. Imagine someone offers him a billion
| dollars for the site. Do you really believe he would refuse and
| hold to these promises? Would you?
| hinkley wrote:
| There are two interpretations of "why".
|
| What is the motivation for it being free.
|
| What is the mechanism for it being free.
|
| In one of the links,
|
| > It amounts to $170 per month. Great news: I have a job (at
| prismic.io) and I can completely afford that. Lichess is my
| hobby, and all hobbies cost a bit of money. I can tell you that
| the joy of building lichess is absolutely worth the price I pay
| for it!
|
| Maybe it's because I spend some number of hours a week looking at
| trees, but it never ceases to amaze me how stupid the average
| technical person is around the word "forever". If you don't have
| a trust set up to pay the hosting costs in perpetuity, you're one
| recession or bad illness away from it being ad-supported. Or
| Microsoft could make you an offer you can't refuse like they did
| with Minecraft.
|
| There are plenty of legal and financial constructs meant to
| approximate a forever status, and I don't see any evidence that
| anyone has tried to achieve any of them.
|
| When are we going to call "making promises you cannot keep" what
| it really is? Lying.
| vkk8 wrote:
| Depends a bit on your location also. In some countries, the
| social security is good enough that people can survive on them
| while doing whatever (low cost) hobbies they like. I've heard
| of a few academics continuing to do research while being
| supported by the unemployment money.
|
| But yeah, some big company offering a crapload of money to buy
| lichess is also a problem. No-one is idealistic enough to
| refuse an amount of money that can support them and their
| family for the next two generations.
| hinkley wrote:
| I should point out that I'm not just random internet grouch
| #435, but someone dabbling with this class of problem.
|
| I'm trying right now to set something up that has the
| potential to have much more value to someone greedy than it
| does to my target audience. It'll take a while I think before
| it really comes to that, but it is not out of the realm of
| reason.
|
| I will most definitely be trying to take the temptation away
| from myself (or my heirs) to sell it. I would likely do that
| anyway, but the goad is that it costs more than I can really
| afford to write off unless I get very lucky, or others
| contribute substantially. There really isn't much incentive
| for them to do that while I own everything outright. If I
| don't want to end up with a cat food diet in my 80's I'm
| probably going to need some of my investment back.
| matkoniecz wrote:
| > Or Microsoft could make you an offer you can't refuse like
| they did with Minecraft.
|
| [citation needed] for Microsoft blackmailing Minecraft
| owner(s).
| hinkley wrote:
| They didn't blackmail anybody, they bought it for $2.5
| billion with a B. That is a titanically difficult number to
| turn down. It's so much money that you can avoid having to
| look at people you told your former plans to.
| joemi wrote:
| > Maybe it's because I spend some number of hours a week
| looking at trees, but it never ceases to amaze me how stupid
| the average technical person is around the word "forever".
|
| If you truly want to be pedantic, the word "forever" does not
| appear in the post at all.
|
| Less pedantically, I believe most people have the ability to
| understand that nothing lasts forever. From reading the post,
| the emphasis was on "free" and not on the longevity. Also the
| title of the post could easily be interpreted to mean "Why
| Lichess will be free for as long as it exists".
| hinkley wrote:
| What's the difference between "always" and "forever"? Do you
| think that's a valid sticking point for people? I'm willing
| to rephrase as I don't see a distinction that matters to any
| of my points.
|
| > "Why Lichess will be free as long as it exists."
|
| Same problem. It's built entirely on wishful thinking. Do you
| agree with all the choices you made when you were twenty? Do
| you agree with all of the choices you made after the first
| time you remember disagreeing with 20 year old you? What
| makes you think you aren't going to disagree with half of
| what you think now?
|
| Current you is going to have to win arguments with future you
| if you insist on any sort of concept or permanence.
| _Especially_ since 75 year old you is going to think the
| concept of permanence is bullshit. If you're not going to
| take any steps in that regard, or even plan to make them in
| the future, then you really don't understand human nature
| very well, and probably not yourself either. That alone is
| worth some hours of quiet contemplation.
| [deleted]
| joemi wrote:
| From
| https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/61436/always-
| vs-...
|
| > In some contexts they mean the same, but differ
| syntactically [...] In other contexts there's a difference
| in that always usually means continuously, at all
| [relevant] times, whereas forever usually means for an
| infinite amount of time into the future.
|
| See the link for examples that might further clarify it for
| you. Obviously stackexchange is not a definitive answer
| space, but you can verify the differences from the linked
| post by looking the words up in a detailed dictionary, like
| the OED.
| neatze wrote:
| > There are plenty of legal and financial constructs meant to
| approximate a forever status.
|
| What are some examples of such legal and financial constructs ?
| hinkley wrote:
| I think in general it was much harder and more surprising for
| Susan G Komen to become what it has than for YouTube to
| become what it has.
|
| You can set up a non-profit, making it easier to accept money
| and adding friction to commercial entities trying to buy you
| out. Of course then have to chase operating expenses forever.
| You do well enough, you can set up a trust or endowments to
| operate in part off of investment profits, and now you don't
| have to worry about one big donor trying to name everything
| after himself or twisting the mandate to their worldview.
|
| Humans can screw anything up given enough time, but if your
| idea is good enough for copycats, then if your successors
| fail to keep the spirit of your goals alive, one of the
| imitators most likely will.
| flpaaa wrote:
| Worse, if the original author could not keep the site up some
| asshole would take the code base, start glichess.org and slowly
| take the credit for it all.
|
| Of course lofty principles would be cited, like "this is how
| open source works" or "you should not have used that license if
| you hadn't wanted this to happen".
|
| And many people here would defend the asshole and forget the
| original author.
| cassepipe wrote:
| Lichess is a non-profit association in France. Microsoft can't
| just buy it. If they have no money no more, they'll launch a
| donation campaign and if it doesn't work, they'll just put the
| site down until they have enough, then it can remain free
| forever. If the association ever breaks down, the code is out
| there for anyone to "reprendre le flambeau" . Thanks to them,
| being able to play chess online is a common good. They're not
| profit driven, they're freedom driven.
| hinkley wrote:
| > Lichess is a non-profit association in France.
|
| I don't see any reference to this in the about pages. For
| this conversation in particular that seems like an important
| oversight if true. American nonprofits tend to list that
| stuff prominently. Maybe too prominently, but that's a whole
| other kettle of fish.
| cassepipe wrote:
| That's literally what's written in the article.
| hinkley wrote:
| As you say, that line is at about the midpoint of the
| article.
|
| Your phrasing leaves it a little up in the air as to
| whether that is what the article is about, which I don't
| think it is.
|
| "That is literally what's written in the article" is
| quite a different statement from, "That's literally
| mentioned in the article."
|
| Yes, that's mentioned in the article. Fine.
| cassepipe wrote:
| English is not my native language, I don't quite master
| all the subtleties.
|
| From what I understood you hijacked the thread into
| something like "don't be gullible, nothing runs forever,
| they're lying" which misrepresented the point of the
| Lichess article which is that they won't charge ever.
|
| Imagine sb reacting to an announcement that healthcare
| will be free with "Nobody lives for ever, don't be
| stupid, they're lying"
|
| Hijacking threads towards your personal point of interest
| is fine I guess and is part of why HN is interesting to
| me but then it should be clear you are talking about your
| own thing and you should not artificially place it in the
| context of the post under discussion (especially if it
| turns out you have not read it through).
| nly wrote:
| laydn posted a coat breakdown above that shows that the service
| costs more like $1,000/day to run, all in...
| JohnJamesRambo wrote:
| I'm sorry the free website hasn't set up a trust for you.
| hinkley wrote:
| I'm sorry a free website is blowing smoke up my ass about
| future plans. I've been hearing this same promise for longer
| than many Hackernews reader have been alive. It does not get
| easier to hear it with each retelling.
|
| There are more than two states available here. An excellent
| time to announce always free is when you set up the trust. An
| excellent time to announce the _intention_ to be free is when
| asking for advice or help with making that happen.
|
| Edit to add: think about it this way. When a prospective love
| interest makes an oddly specific promise, does that make you
| feel more or less safe than you did before? "I'd never cheat
| on you with your brother." "I'd never murder you and bury
| your body in Texas." Well this was a lovely date, I'll call
| you. But I have a busy week and a business trip so it might
| be a little bit.
|
| I was already assuming lichess intended to remain free. Why
| are you telling me that now? Was that in jeopardy? Do we need
| to have a talk?
| JohnJamesRambo wrote:
| I don't know what to say. I think you are extremely zoomed
| in here on a free chess website haha.
| hinkley wrote:
| Entirely possible. I mentioned somewhere else in all of
| this grey text that I've been hearing this exact story
| for 25 years now and it doesn't seem to get any easier to
| hear it from a new mouth.
|
| Everybody says they're going to do their new favorite
| thing forever and everybody either gets distracted, gets
| a new new favorite thing, or worst, gets shit on by life
| and has to backpedal. Just... Roll that good energy into
| literally anything else. Please.
| rectang wrote:
| People don't want to hear it. They want to believe in those
| promises. They like being told beautiful lies.
| hinkley wrote:
| It'll be interesting watching it play out over the next five
| or ten years.
|
| We can't be far from having a critical mass of people who
| realize all the stuff they've been eye-rolling at or
| downvoting is actually true, and then acting like they
| discovered something new. Half the time I'm just parroting
| people older than me. More field correspondent than
| discoverer.
| dylan604 wrote:
| There's a big difference for good intentions that failed vs
| lying. I think you know that too. For $170 a month, it could
| easily switch to a patreon or other type of user contribution
| model. For $170 a month, it could be get a paper route to pay
| for it.
| rectang wrote:
| > _There 's a big difference for good intentions that failed
| vs lying._
|
| That's true. Good intentions are more compelling, so they
| draw more people in and convince them more thoroughly, then
| cause more suffering in the end when everything falls apart.
| hinkley wrote:
| The first principle is that you must not fool yourself and
| you are the easiest person to fool.
|
| - Feynman
|
| Lying to yourself doesn't socially have the same moral hazard
| as intentionally misleading someone, but the outcomes are
| often indistinguishable from the perspective of the affected
| parties.
| noisy_boy wrote:
| All the guy is saying that $170 isn't a big amount for him,
| he is gainfully employed and doesn't expect to be short of
| funds to the extent that he can't afford to run the site.
| There is no need to bring "lying" into this.
|
| > If you don't have a trust set up to pay the hosting costs
| in perpetuity, you're one recession or bad illness away
| from it being ad-supported.
|
| You didn't mention that if the trustees commit a fraud, you
| are one bad trust away from it being ad-supported. Are you
| lying? What, you don't have anyway of knowing that it could
| happen and there are so many other things that can go
| wrong? Exactly.
| torgian wrote:
| I used to have a coworker named Thibault, I wonder if this is the
| same guy.
| tangjurine wrote:
| There's a cost breakdown, but no information I found on how much
| income the site brings in... Curious.
| tangjurine wrote:
| Actually, on the lichess forum two years ago one of the
| volunteers stated that costs ~= revenue. So I'm guessing that
| the main developer salary is mostly the "excess".
| philshem wrote:
| The world needs Libackgammon!
| [deleted]
| patrickdavey wrote:
| Fibs.com ?
| S4M wrote:
| You can make it! There is already lishogi.org for shogi
| (Japanese chess) and lidraughts.org for draughts. They took the
| code for lichess and tweaked it for their respective games.
| philshem wrote:
| I probably can't, but I could put up some seed money and set
| up a non-profit.
| usgroup wrote:
| lichess is by far the finest piece of complex online software
| I've ever used. Desktop or mobile it works perfectly. There is no
| Silicon Valley, Spartan hiring processes, elite University
| filters: just open source contribution and a great quality gate.
|
| It's also a great example of something born of and sustained by a
| community: a testament to the chess demography.
| neatze wrote:
| I wonder, if lichess used UML/SysML diagram(s) sometime in long
| past.
| beberlei wrote:
| This is going to sting but an early version was built on PHP
| and Symfony framework :)
| lmm wrote:
| Interesting, nowadays they're known as one of the big open-
| source Scala products.
| beberlei wrote:
| yes, I believe it was at a hackathon in 2010/2011 when
| during an off-topic discussion with Thibault he mentioned
| moving to Scala. So very long time ago :)
| almavi wrote:
| So many comments failing to grasp the idea of someone wanting his
| job/passion to be publicly available at the cost of him not
| getting rich. So sad.
| dang wrote:
| That is not even close to how this thread turned out.
|
| Would you please not post low-quality disses like this? They
| break the site guidelines, like this one:
|
| " _Please don 't sneer, including at the rest of the
| community._" (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)
|
| - and they lead to extremely low-quality discussion, as seen
| below.
| Noos wrote:
| the problem though is what happens if he gets sick or needs to
| move on, or the passion fades? Now you need to hire someone who
| may not be motivated in the same way, and if compensation is
| low for the duties entailed, you won't get what you need.
|
| It's not good to undervalue work because you really rely on the
| gift of the worker to keep the project going.
| scaladev wrote:
| What else did you expect on a ~~hacker's~~ founder's site? Make
| a billion and retire before hitting 20, that's the goal.
| jperry wrote:
| I'm not sure when "hacker" became a synonym for "ruthless
| capitalist" but it's sad to see, honestly.
| almavi wrote:
| The ability to understand and praise (although not share)
| someone else's goals in life!
| 9387367 wrote:
| HN is most US based, that's one of the richest countries on
| earth where their citizens suffering from epilepsy wear
| bracelets to warn others not to call an ambulance.
| dang wrote:
| Taking HN into nationalistic flamewar is exactly the wrong
| thing to do here and we ban accounts that do it. Please keep
| this sort of off-topic flamebait off this forum.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
|
| By the way, HN users were about 50% in the US, last time I
| checked.
| harperlee wrote:
| ???
|
| So is someone calls an ambulance and they provide you a
| service without you being conscious, you are liable to pay?
| What on Earth?
| cmeacham98 wrote:
| Yep, welcome to the US. Bonus points for the fact ambulance
| rides usually cost thousands of dollars and aren't covered
| by most insurance plans.
| yesenadam wrote:
| I believe the majority on here arent from USA, if that's what
| you meant.
| mattplm wrote:
| Also a lot of people don't realize that he is getting rich with
| that salary in rural France.
| ineedasername wrote:
| They'll never get to unicorn status with that attitude.
|
| Heck, they have no moat! Anyone can just walk in, use their
| source code, and set up their own free chess site!
|
| I'm sure this is all great for chess lovers and the game of chess
| as a whole, but what about all of the investors who will never
| have the thrill of a 10% IPO pop?
|
| It just seems kind of selfish to make such an amazing site and
| then not try to cash in on all that value.
| Zebfross wrote:
| It is noble, but I disagree about ads. Maybe there are products
| that chess players would be genuinely interested in that a
| company would be willing to pay to have advertised. It can be
| completely customized to be tasteful and unobtrusive, and users
| may even be thankful for it. On Wikipedia I'd way rather have
| tasteful ads than the half screen request for donations.
| thelean12 wrote:
| > users may even be thankful for it
|
| That's really just something we tell ourselves to feel better
| about serving ads. It doesn't actually match reality.
| neop1x wrote:
| I agree with OP and disagree with you. People are different. I
| hate ads and I rarely buy products via ads. More often I use
| friend recommendation or product reviews/comparisons. I don't
| want to see ads when I am not planning to buy something.
| xipho wrote:
| This is glorious: https://lichess.org/features. Love the side by
| side comparison :).
| pull_my_finger wrote:
| > There is absolutely nothing positive about advertisements on
| websites from the perspective of their users. They eat up
| valuable screen space and bandwidth for something that nobody
| wants to see. They often manipulate and misinform. They have even
| been the source of security vulnerabilities many times in the
| past.
|
| While I share the loathing of modern Ads as a service or whatever
| the technical name for giving Google/Ad Choices a blank check to
| serve whatever they want on a piece of your web real estate, I
| think you can certainly put up a banner or something responsibly.
| If I run a web dev blog and I put a banner for my VPS that has a
| my referral code, or I come to an agreement with said VPS to show
| an ad for guaranteed credit or I just sell the space directly to
| XYZ company that is relevant to my users I think that is a legit
| way to get a little income without burdening my users.
|
| If Lichess decided to promote some chess books or software on
| their page to supplement their donations, I would be OK with that
| as long as it's done tastefully and responsibly.
| DorianSinDeep wrote:
| While its good that you're willing to compromise in a
| reasonable manner, I don't think it has particular relevance to
| the point that advertisements in any form are most likely to be
| about something you won't go looking for yourself. There are
| even some companies with no advertisement spending because
| their product is so essentially useful that people will seek it
| out themselves.
| aaronbrethorst wrote:
| This is a nice, albeit reductive hypothesis.
|
| Literally the last thing I did before posting this comment
| was email a link to a Facebook in-app ad's advertised product
| to myself because I wanted to look at it in more detail
| tomorrow.
|
| I wasn't looking for the product it was advertising, but I
| see how it could be extremely useful for me if it works.
| foerbert wrote:
| The post qualified that position with an exceptionally mild
| "most likely." A single counterexample is hardly a reason
| to criticize it as reductive.
|
| Unless you do this with the majority of the ads you see,
| and you believe this is a common experience for most
| people?
| DivisionSol wrote:
| Some advertisements are malicious attacks on your attention
| to build brand recognition and entice you to buy things you
| don't need.
|
| However, I think advertising in itself isn't inherently evil.
| If a chess website served non-tracking, static (no-JS) banner
| ads about relevant products (maybe, specifically, chess
| products?) to offset costs, I don't see anything wrong with
| it. Of course the question is: "what is a relevant product to
| advertise next to chess?" Would... other board game
| advertisements be acceptable?
| komali2 wrote:
| Sure but they wouldn't do that, as it doesn't seem to be
| something that would further their stated goal:
|
| > to promote and encourage the teaching and practice of the
| game of chess and its variants".
| lame-robot-hoax wrote:
| I'd argue ads for chess sets actually would do exactly
| that.
| tovej wrote:
| Chess books, maybe. Chess sets? I'm sure most people
| playing chess on lichess are aware of chess sets and
| could get a hold of one without an ad.
| mpol wrote:
| And in the case of chess books, an advertorial is quite
| different from a good review. I very much enjoy reading a
| good review on a chess book, with all the good things and
| bad things. With an advertorial the language is quite
| different and it is very hard to get informed well about
| what you really get when you buy the book. With honest
| critique, I very much enjoy reading about the bad parts,
| and if they are not bad for me, or just a nuance, it
| might be a really good book for me. Only an honest review
| can give me that.
|
| So no, an advertorial for a book does not do anything for
| me.
| why_Mr_Anderson wrote:
| That's exactly how Google ads worked in the very beginning.
| Text only, all in one place, it was great! If we could
| somehow return that type of ads, I'd consider disabling
| adblocker.
| ZephyrBlu wrote:
| This is basically saying that "build it and they will come"
| works, but we know that's a fallacy.
| op03 wrote:
| Wikipedia, Linux, Blender, Firefox are all what?
| sokoloff wrote:
| I could have sworn I've seen ads for Firefox. I know I've
| seen ads _in_ Firefox, some placed by Mozilla, but I
| could have sworn I've seen ads for Firefox not in
| Firefox. (This is nearly impossible to Google for due to
| all the hits for ad-blockers.)
|
| Mozilla spends 10s of millions every year on "advertising
| and promotion" per their financial statements, though
| they have other things to advertise about than just
| Firefox.
| tonyedgecombe wrote:
| Didn't Linus make an announcement on Usenet when he
| started the project. A form of advertising.
| Lvl999Noob wrote:
| This might be survivorship bias talking. I do not have
| any examples with me but I am quite sure, there are a lot
| more projects that ended up dead.
| paxys wrote:
| Most projects end up dead, ad supported or not. I don't
| think that's an argument one way or another.
| op03 wrote:
| They are not Ad based models proving non ad based models
| exist and work especially in the domain of free
| rider/collective action problems.
| ZephyrBlu wrote:
| I would call them the exceptions that prove the rule.
| fnord123 wrote:
| That's not what that means.
|
| It means a sign saying "no blue cars" is the exception
| proving the rule that non-blue cars are allowed.
| auggierose wrote:
| Kind of like special relativity is an exception to
| Newtonian mechanics?
|
| It's good to know the rules, but you shouldn't live your
| life by them.
| curun1r wrote:
| I could see an argument that ads for specific, chess-related
| products like Chessable courses would be welcome on Lichess,
| perhaps even as an opt-in so users can choose to support the
| site. I know Chessable is constantly introducing new courses
| and I don't always remember to check regularly. A banner that
| tells me of a new course I'm interested in would solve that.
| For me, at least, but I doubt I'm the only one.
|
| I wish more sites would do ads without using ad networks.
| Communities like the chess world are small enough that all
| the providers know each other and could probably work
| together in a way that benefits everyone, including users.
| heroku wrote:
| Chessable is a poorly executed idea, with an awful user
| experience.
| maccard wrote:
| > There are even some companies with no advertisement
| spending because their product is so essentially useful that
| people will seek it out themselves
|
| Really? I'd love to hear more about this.
| blueblimp wrote:
| Tesla doesn't run ads, as far as I know.
| maccard wrote:
| I had a look and it seems to be true! Thank you!
|
| _That said_, their "Discover" range of videos on youtube
| sure look like ads (albeit not banner ads). I know that
| Tesla have had a presence at a bunch of EV events here in
| Scotland; they have a stall and cars there that you can
| test drive. It's definitely not banner-ad-on-google, (and
| the publicity from stating they don't do ads is likely an
| ad in itself), but it's definitely "paid marketing"
|
| Super interesting though, thank you for giving me a
| rabbit hole to go down!
| Scarblac wrote:
| Did you see an ad for Hacker News?
|
| I'm writing in a paper notepad right now, found a web shop
| selling it by a normal Google result after describing what
| I was looking for, not an ad.
|
| The pens I always buy I first bought in a stationary store,
| ended up liking them and now I always buy that brand.
|
| Farmers sell their produce to supermarkets probably without
| having to advertize for them, and I go to the particularly
| supermarket I go to because it's closest to where I live.
|
| Lots of things we use on a daily basis we never saw ads
| for, and yet they're sold to us by companies. Somehow.
| maccard wrote:
| > Did you see an ad for Hacker News?
|
| hacker news is heavily affiliated with ycombinator - and
| I can almost guarantee that I've seen ads/puff pieces for
| ycombinator over the last decade.
|
| > The pens I always buy I first bought in a stationary
| store, ended up liking them and now I always buy that
| brand.
|
| Just because you purchased a product without seeing an ad
| for it doesn't mean that that company doesn't have an ad
| spend. How did they get to that stationery store in the
| first place?
|
| > Farmers sell their produce to supermarkets probably
| without having to advertize for them
|
| Farmers likely work with a coop style organisation (who
| _do_ advertise heavily), or maybe have some local link.
| That local link is generated by having a presence in
| local business forums, farmers markets, local stores.
| Back in the day, your local butcher or greengrocer would
| take out full page ad in your town's newspaper to show
| the special offers they have on this week, nowadays I get
| facebook ads for my butcher.
|
| > Lots of things we use on a daily basis we never saw ads
| for, and yet they're sold to us by companies. Somehow.
|
| That's a strawman; the original claim was that there are
| companies with no advertising, not that people buy
| products without seeing advertising for them.
| ZWoz wrote:
| I am not sure, what parent thought and I don't have
| examples without any spending to advertisement, but there
| is very "low profile", almost no ads categories. 1) Big
| business-to-business manufacturers. I haven't ever seen ads
| for compal or asml. I am sure they are presented in trade
| shows and contact directly to potential customers. 2) Small
| data recovery shops. I know few those, one don't advertise
| at all, one uses only google ads (and only few keywords,
| not big budget).
| shard wrote:
| No-ad-spend companies are hard to come up with, some
| possibilities are everyday necessities with very few
| competitors like salt (but I think they advertise a
| little), or utility monopolies (I don't think my local
| water company or garbage collection company advertises,
| but I haven't checked. Maybe they advertise to the
| government offices that select the companies to use?).
| Pre-internet days, it would be easier to be sure some
| businesses don't advertise (neighborhood convenience
| stores or laundromats, for example, that get enough foot
| traffic to not bother advertising), but with the ease of
| throwing up a website nowadays (which should count as
| advertising), this can no longer be assumed.
| maccard wrote:
| The parent's claim is:
|
| > There are even some companies with no advertisement
| spending because their product is so essentially useful
| that people will seek it out themselves.
|
| and that's in response to someone suggesting low
| profile/almost-no-ads. I completely agree about the low-
| profile/almost-no-ad approach (in the tech world having a
| community that evangalises for you is an advertisers wet
| dream, for example!), and I think that's what a lot of
| people in this thread are calling for. On a chess
| website, have ads for chess books/chess boards/novice-to-
| grandmaster streams, that sort of stuff, rather than
| shoving an ad for an Amazon mattress at the bottom of a
| blog post on Continuous Integration!
| Larok00 wrote:
| To me it seems like not starting down that path is the only
| surefire way of drawing a distinction between what is
| acceptable and what isn't.
|
| Also from a user's perspective, I would undoubtedly choose the
| one without ads of the two alternatives if they were competing.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| People go to your web development blog because they want to
| read about web development. They didn't go there for VPS
| advertisements. Make a specific page for that so that anyone
| who wants to know what hosting services you recommend will seek
| it out and visit it.
|
| Anything else means you're selling your reader's attention to
| the highest bidder. You're deliberately adding noise to your
| website and reducing its usability. Also it immediately
| introduces conflict of intetest: you're associated with the
| company you're advertising so any positive opinions you might
| have about their products ought to be taken with several grains
| of salt.
| [deleted]
| 9387367 wrote:
| You are missing the point. Lichess is creating a very strong
| competitive advantage by positioning their platform as ad free.
|
| Want to put this to a test? Imagine if you were to create a
| competitor and you also wanted to run ads, now imagine you will
| be competing with an extremely successful project that people
| love that doesn't run ads so you will never be able to offer a
| better experience to _their_ users.
|
| Lichess is unbeatable.
| giords wrote:
| You're pretty much describing chess.com
| Scarblac wrote:
| And chess.com has more money to spend, so they can have
| things like paid grandmasters streaming, video courses,
| offical tournaments with large prizes. It's not all ad
| based, they also have a subscription model that opens more
| features.
|
| It's good that both exist. I spend 99% of my online chess
| playing time on Lichess but there are also lots of people
| for who it is the other way around.
| greedo wrote:
| You do realize that the world champion regularly plays on
| lichess, right? As do a huge number of GMs?
| nicky0 wrote:
| I think the point was that Chess.com is financially
| supporting lots of streamers (including titled players).
| srg0 wrote:
| chess.com was founded in 2007. lichess started in 2010. So
| chess.com was already an established player.
|
| The point is that creating a new chess site today would
| require to be better than lichess. If we look where Magnus
| Carlsen investment goes, they are all paid services (Play
| Magnus/chess24/chessable). He doesn't event try to compete
| with chess.com/lichess.
| latexr wrote:
| From the text you quoted:
|
| > There is absolutely nothing positive about advertisements on
| websites from the perspective of their users.
|
| From your response:
|
| > I think that is a legit way to get a little income without
| burdening my users.
|
| The former puts users first; the latter puts them last. There's
| a chasm between "what do they want" and "what will they bear".
| bogwog wrote:
| It's always so strange to see people who try to rationalize
| ads. They're either being dishonest about their own opinions
| about ads because they're guilty of serving them, or they're
| so far detached from reality that they genuinely don't see
| how much people hate ads, and just how bad they are for
| consumers.
|
| Maybe it's the Facebooks/Googles of the world who are
| responsible for creating a generation of developers that see
| ads as the only feasible business model?
|
| If you have an ad-supported service, and you remove ads for a
| day, *100%* of your users will love you for it. That should
| tell you something!
| yesenadam wrote:
| I can't tell you how much I love this comment. Thank you. :-)
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| Why are you even offering a compromise when they aren't
| interested? There's plenty of ways for an organization like
| Lichess to raise funds, the ones that don't claim your
| attention or fuck your privacy over. Even sponsored links to
| e.g. chess books as mentioned elsewhere 'leak' data, they
| contain a referral link, linking that user's visit of the
| website to (e.g.) their Amazon account. Plus it would be a
| pittance compared to what Amazon makes off it.
|
| IF they need money they can open up a fundraiser or donation
| channel.
| motiejus wrote:
| Lwn.net does this right: the ads are non-intrusive, and are
| designed for the audience. Most frequently - hosting or
| datacenter space.
| csbartus wrote:
| > If Lichess decided to promote some chess books or software on
| their page to supplement their donations,
|
| Why more? If donations are enough why ads?
|
| "Advertising is the way we grant power to the machine" - said
| Samuel Butler in Erewhon (1872).
|
| I'm thinking a lot about the nature of advertising. I guess,
| after all, it sells excess, stuff which shouldn't exist. It
| propels low quality, overproduction, unlimited and unnecessary
| growth. The pain-points of this current era.
|
| Just take a look at our / tech / programming sector. We are
| well done without ads. I've never seen a Clojure or a CSS ad in
| my life, nor Atom, nor Linux. Nor Gmail, nor TakeShape, nor
| Vercel and the list is endless. Yet still using them and happy
| with them. And they are happy with me.
|
| No ads work. In change, this market requires educated
| participants, not just blind consumers.
| runarberg wrote:
| i remember a few years back when online-go.com (OGS) decided
| to double down on ads in order to fund new servers to speed
| up the service outside of North America[1]. They opted to not
| just place ads in the landing page, but to also display ads
| in the game page. It was a huge disaster. Nobody liked it
| (including the dev who implemented it).
|
| What resulted is that they turned off ads altogether[2]. I
| haven't seen them post about a retrospective, but since
| they've never looked back. It seems like turning off ads was
| a good decision for both the users of OGS and the platform as
| a whole.
|
| 1: https://forums.online-go.com/t/speeding-up-ogs-around-the-
| wo...
|
| 2: https://forums.online-go.com/t/ads-ogs-and-you/14090
| jhrmnn wrote:
| The reason I've felt a strong distaste for ads since being a
| teenager is that ultimately they rob me of, or try to mess
| with, my free choice
| blowski wrote:
| Almost all human interaction is in some way trying to
| persuade you to choose something that you might otherwise
| not. When I ask my wife "Shall we play a board game?" I'm
| in some way doing the same thing. That's not evil.
|
| Advertising is not inherently evil.
|
| When it becomes evil is when it intentionally tries to
| deceive us, capture and processe insane amounts of
| information about us, and influence the display of
| information for its own ends. If I did that to my wife, it
| wouldn't be OK.
| johannes1234321 wrote:
| > Advertising is not inherently evil.
|
| Evil isn't an objective measure. However ads want to get
| some attention away from the content I care about to the
| ad.
|
| One can argue that the "classic" Google ad, where I
| search for a pan and Google showing me ads for shops
| selling pans serves my request, at the same time I can
| argue that I was looking for a somewhat objective (while
| that's a lie - the algorithm showing search results has
| some biases) listing, while I get the one paying most.
|
| In my judgment the ad is bad, but the attention it drags
| is my payment for the information.
| MauranKilom wrote:
| Right, but the game theory there is pretty obvious: The
| better an ad is at "hacking" your mind and exploiting
| human characteristics, the more money it makes. Which
| naturally leads to this insane spiral of increasingly
| manipulative and insidious ads.
|
| If your single purpose in life was to play board games
| with your wife, you would probably also observe these
| tendencies in your questions.
| skinkestek wrote:
| > The better an ad is at "hacking" your mind and
| exploiting human characteristics, the more money it
| makes.
|
| The same can be said about any negotiation or even any
| interaction, can't it? Yet there are some people and some
| companies you like and some that you don't like.
|
| I've been a customer liaison at a place where the
| customer actively went out of their way to see our sales
| guy; yes, it cost them money but he'd get them a better
| deal the they could on their own or with any other vendor
| they knew. He'd actively reduce his sale if possible
| without even mentioning but the customer had been with us
| for years and had noticed the pattern.
|
| There's no reason why ads aren't a spectrum as well:
|
| I see nothing wrong with a link to "this is the gear that
| I use" on a clearly marked page as long as they actually
| use it.
|
| Or a couple of books. ("You _must_ read these 30 books to
| be a successful <x>" is of course another thing
| entirely.)
| fnord123 wrote:
| >When it becomes evil is when it intentionally tries to
| deceive us, capture and processe insane amounts of
| information about us, and influence the display of
| information for its own ends. If I did that to my wife,
| it wouldn't be OK.
|
| No single snowflake is responsible for the avalanche.
| Even if a single ad is not inherently evil, in aggregate
| they have become a problem.
| blowski wrote:
| To stretch your analogy:
|
| 1. Not all snowflakes become avalanches.
|
| 2. If we didn't have snowflakes, we wouldn't have snow,
| and that would cause huge problems as well.
| zimbatm wrote:
| Ads are an attack on our attention.
|
| When I go to a website, I decide to direct my attention to this
| website, because I believe it will offer something of interest
| to me.
|
| Obviously things don't come for free, somebody has to pay for
| it, but the issue is that as a user, I didn't agree to getting
| my attention diverted. The trade isn't done upfront and by the
| time I see the ad, it's already too late.
|
| There is also a collective argument to me made about humanity
| browsing like headless chickens and not being able to focus on
| important things because of all these distractions.
| paulcole wrote:
| > Ads are an attack on our attention.
|
| He said after celebrating 10 years posting on a site that's
| an ad for a VC fund...
| jedimastert wrote:
| Everything is an "attack" on our attention. It's not a very
| useful distinction.
|
| I clicked the link because the title caught my attention. I
| come to this website because it has a rotation of good
| content, all of which is more likely than not to catch and
| hold my attention, keeping it from something else.
|
| I also don't generally agree that all ads are bad, which may
| put me in the minority
| GavinMcG wrote:
| Even accepting that everything counts as an attack, there
| can't be an ad attacking your attention when it _doesn 't
| exist_ on the page in the first place.
| ApolloFortyNine wrote:
| >there can't be an ad attacking your attention when it
| doesn't exist on the page in the first place.
|
| We can even go one step further and say there can't be an
| ad attacking your attention when the page itself doesn't
| exist at all.
|
| The bulk of the internet wouldn't exist if not for ads.
| Things like youtube almost certainly could not exist,
| with how expensive it is to store data, provide
| bandwidth, develop the site itself. It's only thanks to
| ads that the internet is where it is today.
| GavinMcG wrote:
| Which is why the parent comment acknowledged that
| "Obviously things don't come for free, somebody has to
| pay for it".
|
| The fact that ads got us here doesn't mean that we should
| uncritically accept that business model going forward.
| jedimastert wrote:
| I put "attack" in scare-quotes for a reason. I don't see
| any of these things as an "attack". If I did, I wouldn't
| do them.
| GavinMcG wrote:
| Well then you're not really engaging with the parent
| comment.
|
| The author said they "decide to direct my attention to
| _this website_ " and used "attack" because they "didn't
| agree to getting my attention diverted."
|
| The useful distinction is between the content you came to
| the website to direct your attention toward, and things
| that tear your attention away.
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| Hmm, I'm very anti-ads; they're a scourge on society.
| However, a genuine report of "I read this book, you can get
| it here" isn't really any different attention-wise if it
| has a referral code.
|
| Now, the problem is there's no way to know if it was
| motivated at all (nor to what extent) by the promise of a
| referral fee. So it could be noise and not a genuine
| referral based on intrinsic qualities of the product.
|
| I've advertised things on my blog, using referral codes,
| because that helps me defray hosting charges (I've largely
| stopped as the income is far too low in recent years; I've
| also mostly moved my content to third party sites with open
| licenses) but they've always been genuine either
| comparative reviews (which I was doing to help me decide
| what to get) or recommendations based on something I use.
| I'm putting that link there anyway, the company might as
| well pay me if anyone follows it.
|
| "For example I used to use Digital Ocean to spin up a
| Minecraft server for occasional use, recently I've been
| using Vultr for the same - it seems substantially cheaper,
| and there was a good deal on for a free month."
|
| Suppose that true comment had referral links, would it
| really be intrinsically worse?
| topicseed wrote:
| Would you say the same about free TV's ads coming mid-
| program? Or newspapers you actually buy that still contain
| ads? How would such a trade be done upfront in your opinion?
|
| In a way, you are the one coming to PLATFORM (site,
| newspaper, TV program), so don't come back maybe, but don't
| tell PLATFORM whether they can out a distracting vase at the
| entrance, or ads on the sidebar, or a distracting ticker at
| the bottom of the screen.
| Lio wrote:
| I recently cancelled a NowTV subscription because of the
| unskippable trailers at the start of each programme.
|
| For free to air TV I only watch, and it's very occasionally
| these days, shows that I have recorded to PVR where I skip
| all the adverts.
|
| I avoid sites with pop-overs for newsletters or animated
| averts whenever possible.
|
| They're not a "distracting vase at the entrance" they're a
| "crass man who steps into your path whilst screaming in
| your face".
|
| I don't know what business models such sites should adopt
| but I do know that things that invasively take control from
| me or try to break my concentration, if only for a moment,
| are things I find deeply unpleasant.
|
| That might say more about me than the advertising industry
| but there you go.
|
| I'm grateful for sites like lichess and the stance they are
| taking. It's lovely and quite.
| deallocator wrote:
| I think the correct analogy would be that there's a corner
| in the screen where advertisement is playing constantly
| while whatever show you're watching runs. Obviously the
| advertisement is going to distract you from time to time,
| and you won't have your full attention on the show.
| laurowyn wrote:
| Is forcibly breaking away from the content you want to
| watch every 10 minutes to show ads not distracting? or
| the 2 minutes of repeated content from before the break
| to remind you what was happening before you got
| distracted by the ads not also distracting? Have you ever
| watched a show with the ads removed and seen how much of
| it is actually repeated just because of ad placements?
|
| Just because it's not on screen the entire time doesn't
| mean it isn't a distraction. TV ad breaks are one of the
| best methods for producers - guaranteed impressions,
| broad audiences, official metrics, etc. - whilst also
| being the worst for consumers. An hour of my time set
| aside for watching something I enjoy now contains 20
| minutes of content I don't care about at all, and cannot
| skip/bypass if not interested, and the 40 minutes of
| content is closer to 30 because of repeated content
| either side of ad breaks.
| sokoloff wrote:
| That is a huge part of why TiVo was so transformative
| when it came out.
|
| "We'll be back in...<skip, skip, skip, skip>...and we're
| back."
| [deleted]
| silicon2401 wrote:
| This is a pretty extreme and entitled position. You're the
| one assuming that the website will offer you something of
| interest without any reason to do so, and that you should
| receive it however you want (without ads). If anything it's
| more reasonable to assume that you'll see ads on every page
| you go to.
|
| I take the complete opposite position: if I take the effort
| to make a website, I'll do what I want with it. Maybe I
| consider your visit an attack on my bandwidth, and I
| compensate with ads. If you don't like it, you're free to not
| visit it. Unless I told you in advance that you're not going
| to see ads, there's no basis for assuming that there won't be
| ads just like there's no basis for assuming you won't see
| NSFW content on a random website, religious content,
| political content, etc
| Chris2048 wrote:
| > You're the one assuming that the website will offer you
| something of interest without any reason to do so
|
| Says who? Arguing against ads isn't arguing against
| compensation. You're assuming what is being assumed.
| silicon2401 wrote:
| Says the comment I replied to
|
| > When I go to a website, I decide to direct my attention
| to this website, because I believe it will offer
| something of interest to me.
| sillysaurusx wrote:
| They don't have to be.
|
| Let me do some advertising right now. Daniel Naroditsky's
| twitch stream is amazing. Go watch 'em
| https://www.twitch.tv/gmnaroditsky
|
| (If you're into chess, you almost certainly already know
| about him.)
|
| He also gets into feuds with Hikaru and won't shut up about
| him for some reason nowadays, and is constantly on a soapbox,
| but whatever. The chess is fun to watch.
|
| Now, if you saw a banner ad for that on lichess, would you
| really feel awful about it? I mean, that's a fine
| perspective, but I'm of the opinion of "just shovel all the
| content in front of me and let me pick out what I like." It
| works wonderfully on YouTube's recommendation algorithm.
|
| But of course, your feelings are justified for modern ads as
| currently implemented. Mobile games are just a complete
| horror fest now. (It was delightful to discover Cardinal
| Quest 2, since every aspect of the game can be played without
| paying a cent or seeing an ad. It's more or less "chess, but
| with monsters.")
| __s wrote:
| lichess has links to streamers on the home page, so they
| are serving ads by your definition
|
| Naroditsky isn't paying you to promote his stream, so it
| doesn't qualify as an ad as ads are being referred to in
| lichess's post
| bscphil wrote:
| > Now, if you saw a banner ad for that on lichess, would
| you really feel awful about it?
|
| Frankly, yes. Lichess is such a relief because I know it's
| a place I can go without someone trying to sell me
| something.
| amadvance wrote:
| Did you donated to it ? Because this is possible only
| with donations.
|
| I did, but if at some point they will have to add some
| ad, I won't consider that awful if done in the right way.
| paxys wrote:
| > I did, but if at some point they will have to add some
| ad
|
| Why? Plenty of sites are able to survive solely on a
| donation model, even large ones. Look at Wikipedia.
| sillysaurusx wrote:
| Fair!
| michaelt wrote:
| _> They don 't have to be._
|
| Modest ads wouldn't be a problem if I hadn't seen so many
| major sites follow a slippery slope from that to obnoxious
| ads and heavy tracking.
|
| After all, ad money $ will show up instantly and measurably
| in an A/B test or project outcome, while turned-off users,
| lost trust, garish design and poor performance have much
| subtler, harder to measure impacts.
|
| And before you know it you're a newspaper website with 20
| tracking scripts, or youtube with ads layered on ads
| layered on ads.
| Stratoscope wrote:
| > _Ads are an attack on our attention._
|
| That may well be true, but let me tell you a story.
|
| I recently got into binge watching some old TV shows I
| enjoyed as a kid, like What's My Line and a few others. But
| most of the YouTube copies have the commercials stripped out!
|
| The few videos that have the old commercials are a blast. The
| Remington Rand Univac Electronic Brain. The Remington Rand
| Shaver! And as we all know, 9 out of 10 doctors recommend
| Camels.
|
| Flintstones fan? How about Fred and Barney sneaking out back
| to smoke some Winstons while Wilma and Betty mow the lawn.
|
| I wonder which of today's web ads will achieve the cultural
| significance of these old classics?
| paxys wrote:
| > I wonder which of today's web ads will achieve the
| cultural significance of these old classics?
|
| This is very unlikely. Back in the day ads were a form of
| content in themselves. They _had to_ be memorable to be
| effective, since your TV did not have a "click here"
| button. Web ads are more comparable to junk flyers, and I
| doubt you remember any of those.
| Stratoscope wrote:
| After reading the replies, I should clarify something. When
| I see some of those old commercials today, I too think they
| are appalling. Fred and Barney smoking Winstons? _On a kid
| 's show?_ 9 out of 10 doctors recommending Camels? Ugh. But
| they sure are interesting to see again.
|
| Some of the other ads were great. A live report from the
| computer room where the Remington Rand Univac Electronic
| Brain was predicting the weather? Awesome! And a big step
| on the way to today where I can use Weather Underground
| forecasts and talk to you over radio and light waves on our
| personal supercomputers.
| jek0 wrote:
| A friend of mine, from Romania, has fond memories of his
| youth under the communist rule of Nicolae Ceausescu, being
| always reminded how great the leader was and how he admired
| him as a kid.
|
| He discovered later he was only manipulated into that, but
| still classified this as good memories.
|
| It's a little bit like those old adverts, it doesn't mean
| it is a good thing to perpetuate.
| zorked wrote:
| Sorry but those commercials have no cultural significance.
| It's just stuff you remember.
| catlifeonmars wrote:
| What exactly is cultural significance?
| Stratoscope wrote:
| You are right, of course. But isn't "cultural
| significance" just another way of saying "stuff people
| remember?"
| auxym wrote:
| A literature teacher of mine would say, "culture is what
| you remember after you've forgotten everything about my
| class".
| timeslip1523 wrote:
| As propaganda ages and stops being an effective meme-
| weapon, the propaganda fades and the art shined through.
| Old, obsolete ads for dead products that you look up out of
| curiosity are mostly harmless.
|
| Still doesn't mean I'm not installing and updating my
| adblocker!
| vishnugupta wrote:
| I too look back at old ads with fondness and reminisce
| about the simple times of late 80s and early 90s. However
| when I recollect how I felt _at that time_ about those ads
| it 's no different from today.
|
| The fondness that I associate with those ads are because
| they are a window to a world that was simpler and in
| someways beautiful. Do I miss those times? Somewhat. Do I
| want those days back? Probably not, because for me (and my
| generation) the progress has been stupendous.
| Stratoscope wrote:
| Indeed, for me that would be the late 1950s. Times were
| simpler in some ways, not so much in others.
|
| Our house was one of the first built in the neighborhood.
| The house being built next door after we moved in had one
| feature we didn't have: a bomb shelter!
|
| So we made that our neighborhood clubhouse. It was a
| place where all the kids could hang out. We brought
| cookies and snacks and prepared for survival.
|
| And when nothing bad ended up happening, and the new
| owners moved in and kicked us out, we were just happy
| that the world hadn't ended!
| vishnugupta wrote:
| That is such an awesome story, thanks for sharing!
|
| Thanks to HN for connecting people across time and space
| and enabling exchange of memorable experiences.
| lazyweb wrote:
| That sounds to me like you're having an emotional /
| nostalgic response to things you were exposed to during
| your youth. And there is some kind of novelty to watching
| older commercials, no doubt. But IMO that wears of quickly.
| What's left is capitalistic propaganda often riddled with
| sexism, misogynism, homophobia etc. which to me is the real
| cultural significance. Not exactly sure what changed
| though, wether companies discovered it's more profitable to
| put on an act of some kind of progressive consumerism, or
| if it's an actual response to an evolving society.
| Stratoscope wrote:
| Guilty as charged! And of course when I view some of
| those old commercials through my modern eyes, I am
| shocked.
|
| But you have to admit that the Remington Rand Univac
| Electronic Brain predicting the weather was pretty cool,
| yes?
| roenxi wrote:
| That is like saying the taste of good food is an attack on
| our reward system. Attention works that way _because_ it is
| often helpful.
|
| On a normal day advertising is pretty useless. When the world
| is changing it is a very effective way to find that out. It
| is part of the system that drives rapid improvement.
| Chris2048 wrote:
| The sugar and salt added to food is an attack on our reward
| system - but that doesn't make it good food.
|
| The fact is that human biological impulse does not line up
| with rational objectives. People wouldn't need to be
| subjected to ads if it was desirable - they'd ask for them,
| much like those "shopping channels" you can _choose_ to
| watch.
| roenxi wrote:
| As a general comment - human biological impulses do
| generally line up with rational objectives. That is why
| we have them. Normally they line up with ideas that are
| so good it makes sense to embed them in how we live.
|
| > People wouldn't need to be subjected to ads if it was
| desirable
|
| Substantial value from ads is they communicate (1) what
| people didn't yet know existed and (2) what everyone else
| knows (because they saw the ad too).
|
| Ads work by and large because people want the products
| that the ads are selling. A lot of ads are stupid and I'd
| personally rather not see them - but if I think that,
| they also probably aren't targeted at me.
| dash2 wrote:
| Use the back button and don't go there again. Website owners
| need to make a living, they have a right to try to do so the
| way they see best, and not all consumers share your
| preferences.
| sildur wrote:
| I also have a right to handle their HTML the way I see fit,
| for instance by blocking their ads. If they don't like it,
| they should make their website private.
| paulcole wrote:
| > I also have a right to handle their HTML the way I see
| fit
|
| I see this more as you technically having the ability to
| do this, but what makes it your "right"?
| LocalPCGuy wrote:
| Not the OP, but I have the right to control what code is
| delivered to (downloaded) and run on my computer.
|
| That doesn't mean I have the right to use a website that
| decides they aren't good with me doing so without the ads
| or other portions I may block.
|
| I don't believe I have any moral obligation to make that
| choice myself. Simply put, I have the right to block ads,
| and the website has the right to block usage to me if I
| don't load said ads, trackers, etc.
| paulcole wrote:
| > Simply put, I have the right to block ads
|
| Let's assume I agree that you have been tricked into
| following a link that is infested with terrible ads and
| that I agree you have the right to block those ads.
|
| Isn't it then your obligation to never visit that site
| again?
|
| You understand that ads are how the website has chosen to
| make money. You don't like how they have chosen to make
| money so you simply never visit the website again, right?
|
| It's like if you found out a restaurant didn't accept
| cash and still kept going to eat there when you only had
| a credit card, knowing in advance you can't and won't
| pay.
| sildur wrote:
| > Isn't it then your obligation to never visit that site
| again?
|
| Not really. As long as your site is public, I can enter.
| If you don't want that, make it private, or subscription
| only.
|
| > It's like if you found out a restaurant didn't accept
| cash and still kept going to eat there when you only had
| a credit card, knowing in advance you can't and won't
| pay.
|
| It's more like going to a public museum that accepts
| donations and not making a donation. The place is public,
| and I decide if I pay or not.
| LocalPCGuy wrote:
| No, how a website monetizes their site is not my concern.
| Just because they choose ads does not obligate me to
| decide to not go there again. In fact, due to my
| technology choices, I may never even realize they have
| chosen that route as I may never see their ads in the
| first place.
|
| As a publicly available resource, it is like browsing. I
| can browse many brick and mortar stores without
| exchanging anything of value. And like a store, if a
| website decided they did not want people browsing without
| a purchase, they could block access.
| ratww wrote:
| Using the back button is not enough.
|
| Even using your method, the website will transmit
| information about me to several ad networks without my
| consent about retargeting, about which sites I'm visiting,
| which sites I visited before (via referrer header) and will
| fingerprint me. Even with their (mostly non-compliant) GDPR
| cookie banners, information is still transmitted.
|
| As far as I'm concerned, no website owner has ever given me
| a choice of "just using the back button".
|
| Only ad-blocking is enough to stop this from happening.
| pabs3 wrote:
| Your browser is the entity transmitting information to ad
| networks, your browser is obeying instructions from the
| website instead of obeying your instructions.
| fsflover wrote:
| Which happens because you run non-free JS code:
| https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/javascript-trap.html
| pabs3 wrote:
| Any kind of requests can be used for tracking purposes,
| not just JS.
| johannes1234321 wrote:
| Whether the code is free or not is irrelevant for that.
| tnzm wrote:
| Is there any other kind of code which can be ascertained
| to obey its user?
| johannes1234321 wrote:
| The question is who audits it etc.
|
| This will become more funny with We assembly. There
| review isnahrder and even if it is free software it will
| be ages to verify the code the server delivers matches
| the source.
|
| There is a fundamental control issue where a license
| debate is irrelevant detour. (For me this is the biggest
| flaw in the FSF - they haven't grasped that yet, while
| smart ideas would be needed)
| fsflover wrote:
| > The question is who audits it etc.
|
| The question is whether it is auditable and improvable.
| This is what free software is for.
| paxys wrote:
| There are many free and open source ad trackers out
| there.
| fsflover wrote:
| Any examples of free JS doing that?
| ddevault wrote:
| No one has a right to a viable business model. If it makes
| a negative impact on society, we can and should regulate
| it. Ads are a pox on this Earth.
| vasco wrote:
| When you open the window do you feel the roads, houses or
| buildings you see are an attack on your attention? That your
| own house is an attack on the attention of others? That
| people would rather just see the raw nature that was there
| before?
| jedimastert wrote:
| I don't, but I don't think it's as uncommon a view as you
| seem to make it out to be.
| paxys wrote:
| No but a street full of posters and billboards definitely
| is.
| ulimn wrote:
| Yes, I do sometimes.
| Hoasi wrote:
| Absolutely. Modern architecture, coupled with politicians
| and developers's greed and the lack of urban planners
| care, can be an attack on our intelligence, our senses
| and our basic human aesthetic needs. It's not just about
| capturing our attention.
| tayo42 wrote:
| Those few good years after pop up ads were eliminated by pop
| up blockers and ad blockers was so nice. Then the war on ad
| block began and internet is worse then it used to be.
|
| Auto play videos in a modal that can't be closed that start
| with a video on. Wtf
| alpaca128 wrote:
| Popups and ads can still be blocked very effectively. Since
| I downloaded a comprehensive hosts file blacklist and
| filled all checkboxes in uBlock Origin's settings it's
| extremely rare something slips through, and if it does I
| can just interactively add a rule for it with a few clicks.
| cletus wrote:
| It's pretty much mandatory to have (yet another) addon to
| disable autoplaying videos, sadly.
|
| I think I hate this more than ads, honestly (not all
| autoplaying videos are ads).
| grishka wrote:
| Thankfully all news websites serve their videos from a
| separate domain, so you only have to block that in your
| ad blocker. Or, just disable JavaScript and hope that
| won't break images because loading images with JavaScript
| is apparently also the hot new thing to do.
| smichel17 wrote:
| Firefox lets you do this without need for an addon. Stop
| using an ad company's browser if you don't want to see
| ads; there is a huge conflict of interest.
| pessimizer wrote:
| Google also almost entirely finances firefox development.
| gordian-mind wrote:
| Does this mean Firefox is controlled opposition? }:)
| executesorder66 wrote:
| If they did that I'd immediately switch to something else.
| Nothing pisses me off more that spam. And all ads are spam. If
| I wanted something, I'd look for it. If you have to tell me
| about it first, then it's spam. Don't waste people's
| time/bandwidth/attention with things they didn't even want in
| the first place.
|
| And the counterpoint that "but they might not have known about
| x product in the first place" is useless. Because if they
| wanted/needed something like x they would have just googled
| "something that can do x" and found x.com or whatever to
| discover it. To reiterate, the fact that they weren't looking
| for it in the first place means that they didn't want it.
|
| See also this[0] guy that did extensive tests and found that
| "tasteful and responsible" banner ads pissed people off enough
| to negatively affect traffic to his website.
|
| [0]https://www.gwern.net/Ads
| surfsvammel wrote:
| I believe what they are saying is that money is not the goal,
| the goal is the spread chess, and having ads does not
| contribute to that goal. That's it.
|
| I find it quiet strange, that we are living in a world where
| ads are so ubiquitous that a site is explaining why they don't
| have ads, rather than webpages that use ads explain why they
| do.
| indigochill wrote:
| From the outside, I like what ReadTheDocs does with Ethical
| Ads. Because ReadTheDocs's scope is largely limited to
| technical users, they can deliver "targeted marketing" where
| they're delivering ads based on the content of their pages
| rather than user tracking. Also the ads I remember seeing
| didn't feature attention-grabbing images, just a solid
| background, the advertiser's logo, and some text about what
| they're selling. It meshed a lot better with the page content
| than most ads do.
| nindalf wrote:
| I might have played 2000 games on lichess at this point.
| Everything from the ease of finding a game, to the smoothness of
| web and mobile clients, to features centred around analysing and
| improving your game are nearly flawless. Seeing this post about
| their commitment to keeping it that way thrills me.
| mproud wrote:
| Always good to see. (I'm tired of seeing ads everywhere too!)
| Bravo.
|
| Though, I disagree on the restaurant analogy. Not being open-
| source isn't the lack of willingness to share the ingredients.
| It's choosing not to share the recipe, which is almost every
| restaurant.
| inferense wrote:
| This is a bummer. As much as I love lichess, I think there's a
| beautiful array of opportunities of monetisation which I believe
| would be nothing short of wrong incentives. Value-based
| monetisation (instead of restriction / ad based monetisation)
| might as well motivate the team to maximise that value for the
| user.
|
| Just a couple of examples (for which I'd be actually willing to
| pay for)
|
| 1. Stockfish, server-side game analysis, learning from mistakes
| 2. Deep individual analysis based on XY games, practicing on weak
| spots, openings etc. with stockfish 3. Their practice library
|
| Again, all of these are super valuable to those who want to take
| their game to the next level, don't see why anyone in that
| segment wouldn't pay for this. The "entertainment" feature of
| lichess which is the chess itself should be free indeed.
| thomasahle wrote:
| > 1. Stockfish, server-side game analysis, learning from
| mistakes
|
| I'm not sure what you mean by 2 and 3, but lichess already has
| server side analysis.
|
| If it's just that you'd like to pay for it, you can set up
| donations. You can also contribute your own server to the
| analysis cluster.
|
| Lichess is a really inspiring project on how a free/open source
| software community can provide the same value based features
| that we normally assume can only be done by monetization.
| yesenadam wrote:
| > beautiful array of opportunities of monetisation
|
| I think that's the first time I've seen "beautiful" and
| "monetisation" in the same phrase.
| neweraccount wrote:
| Sorry if this question is off topic. What is the seemingly random
| characters in blog url "../YF-ZORQAACAA89PI/..". Does it have any
| significance in article or blog management? For all blog articles
| from lichess I see this.
| laydn wrote:
| Cost breakdown here:
|
| https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Si3PMUJGR9KrpE5lngSk...
|
| I hope OVH would donate some compute/machines to lichess. It
| would help lichess a lot financially. It would be good publicity
| for OVH and I think it would be a drop in the ocean on their
| balance sheet.
| nly wrote:
| Holy hell that's an expensive project. Do donations cover all
| this, or are the operators independently wealthy and generous?
| YetAnotherNick wrote:
| That's a cheap project. I have seen a single developer's
| salary to be more than that. Considering that around a
| billion games were played last year in lichess.
| sillysaurusx wrote:
| Uh, $55k a year is not cheap! What world... Ok, it's late,
| I'll hold back the rest of my words. :)
|
| I think you were saying it's cheap relative to the impact
| it has. I agree. But "holy hell that's expensive" is an
| entirely accurate reaction for someone who wants to fund it
| out of pocket.
|
| (Gwern covers our TPU/ML infrastructure costs for around
| $350/mo, and I wince that I wasn't able to optimize it
| cheaper.)
| jpeter wrote:
| 55k is just the cost of the server. The total cost is
| 400k
| sillysaurusx wrote:
| Holy guacamole, I didn't scroll down far enough. Thank
| you for pointing this out.
|
| "French taxes" is $53k, which is nearly equal to their
| server fees. Wow.
|
| Props to them for however they manage to get $400k/yr for
| a free project with no business model, and no intended
| business model. (I'm serious; it's a wonderful thing for
| the world, and a tremendous example of what people can
| achieve without having a monetary focus.)
| ishiz wrote:
| What I find interesting is the part at the bottom that
| shows how much a donation helps: a $5 donation is enough to
| cover the company's budget for 6 minutes. This sounds
| really good for a few reasons: 1) since I play Lichess for
| several hours a month, I feel that I'm really getting my
| money's worth; 2) Lichess only needs a few thousand people
| to contribute $5/mo to stay net positive and I feel like
| it's easier to convince a few thousand people in a
| supportive community to part ways with $5 than it is for
| other companies to get a million people to donate $1; 3) I
| remember Reddit used to show on your profile how many
| server minutes your Gold purchase was worth and it would
| display something like 200 minutes for every $5 purchase,
| but this is only a single server out of hundreds and
| doesn't account for any other expenses, so Lichess is
| unsurprisingly very cheap to operate in comparison.
| tdubhro1 wrote:
| Interesting that a non profit pays 55k in French taxes
| ironicsonic wrote:
| Most likely taxes on wage for the main developer salary. The
| tax wedge in France is slightly under 50%, so that checks
| out.
| tonyedgecombe wrote:
| It's progressive and only gets to 45% once you reach
| EUR155K so that doesn't sound quite right.
| paduc wrote:
| I believe he's talking about social contributions
| (health, retirement, unemployment), that the employer
| pays, and not the taxes on revenue (paid by the
| employee).
| matsemann wrote:
| I feel like the developer/founder should have a higher salary.
| $58k a year for running a site with millions of games per day..
| deserves more. Is it because they don't get enough donations?
| Or saving the extra money for growth/buffer?
|
| (edit: originally posted this as a top level comment but felt
| it fit better here)
|
| Edit2: just checked. I've spent 11 whole days playing chess
| there (and not sure if that only counts games and not tactics
| etc). Made my first donation now.
| indigochill wrote:
| >I feel like the developer/founder should have a higher
| salary.
|
| This is probably the root of most of tech's angst: people
| thinking they're entitled to get rich just because they made
| /run something.
|
| If you can live comfortably doing something as rewarding as
| making something like Lichess, what more can you really want?
| People are talking about FU money/financial independence,
| which I agree is nice, but you can totally get there on
| $58k/year by living below your means and investing.
|
| The reason I say it leads to angst is when you expect more
| than a comfortable salary, you're imposing a higher financial
| burden on the overall system than necessary, which can
| sometimes work in the short term, but in the long term
| introduces drag on development/stability because those extra
| thousands you're personally socking away aren't going
| towards, say, getting a contractor to address little issues
| or going into the rainy day fund.
| hinkley wrote:
| If you shelve the cynicism, I think the main reason you
| want a big pile of cash around is so when you discover that
| thing that makes you happy you don't miss out on it. You
| don't have to compromise.
|
| But people get distracted by things they "can afford," the
| amount of money they "need" ratchets way up, and they find
| themselves missing out on things and making compromises
| anyway.
|
| If you have already found a thing or two that makes you
| happy, you don't need to hedge so much. You don't have to
| keep trying to stuff things into a hole in your chest
| trying to fill it up.
|
| Many, many of my parents' problems went away when one of
| them started making over $50k a year. If they had been more
| content then it would have solved many more. Adjusted for
| inflation that's a bit more than $58K today, but if your
| spouse is doing well enough, that's still perfectly
| workable. If your health holds.
| matsemann wrote:
| I'm not talking about entitlement. But this guy is really
| good at multiple things. SRE, frontend, backend, project
| management etc. He could probably earn twice as much
| working a normal job, and even more for the right company.
|
| He don't want to. And maybe don't want/need to earn more.
| And that is completely fine. But his impact is huuuge. I'd
| wish more people did like him. But I don't think many will,
| because those skilled enough to make something similar
| would rather work for a higher salary.
|
| So it's more a sigh from me, that I'd wish more people
| would be able to sustain making and giving away something
| great like this, without having to sacrifice money. Why
| should optimizing ad clicks give you millions, but making
| this only thousands?
|
| You know, in the same way there often are discussions here
| about making open source income viable. It would be better
| for everyone if these unsung heroes got more than just
| praise. Then others would follow suit.
| agustif wrote:
| If he keeps 100% of ownership, that 58k can become 500k
| in a few years?
| jononor wrote:
| What do you mean by ownership? Lichess is a non-profit
| association, not a limited company owned by the
| developer.
| littlestymaar wrote:
| > But this guy is really good at multiple things. SRE,
| frontend, backend, project management etc. He could
| probably earn twice as much working a normal job, and
| even more for the right company.
|
| AFAIK, he is French, so you need to compare it with the
| local job market: there's no way he could get twice as
| much even in the most-paying company here, the market
| price for such a profile is probably around EUR70k,
| assuming he wanted to work in Paris[1] (or maybe Lille or
| Lyon), and if he lives anywhere else in France, he's
| probably already earning as much as he could wish, and
| he's working one something that matters to him. I would
| totally take such a deal.
|
| [1] Ok, this is probably way less relevant nowadays,
| since covid made remote work mainstream for most of us,
| but remote work was barely imaginable in most French
| company before the pandemic came.
| seszett wrote:
| Pretty sure he lives somewhere in Western France where
| housing is a lot more affordable than Paris (or Lille or
| Lyon).
| dwaltrip wrote:
| He seems like he is truly in the upper echelons of
| engineering and product development ability, including
| soft skills as well. I'm sure he could easily make more
| than EUR70k. He might need to live in a major city
| though.
| alexgmcm wrote:
| In France that's a reasonable salary for an experienced
| engineer.
|
| I agree it's low for someone running the whole show, but then
| he is doing it as a non-profit.
|
| Tech salaries in the US are really high compared to RoW, even
| once CoL is taken into account.
| iSnow wrote:
| Gross avg. wage in France is $42700[1] if calculated with 12
| months and no variable benefits. Mean would be more
| interesting, but I don't seem to easily find it.
|
| It might sound weirdly low for someone in IT in the USA, but
| first, not everyone commands FAANG sales, and second, wages
| in the EU are comparatively low. With some seniority, you can
| rise to $100k relatively easily, but you have to sell your
| soul to either some consulting company or old Fortune-500
| industries.
|
| So could be the dev takes an above-avg wage which would be
| around junior to semi experienced level developer and just
| does what they want to do: build a chess community.
|
| EDIT: I don't fully understand the tax part, but if the
| nonprofit also pays his taxes and he goes out with $54k net,
| he's doing very, very well for an EU country. I've just
| reached that level give or take and I have lots of seniority
| in a really profitable old economy country. If I would be
| gunning higher, I'd have to do consulting or go the people
| management track.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_European_countries_
| by_...
| FartyMcFarter wrote:
| FAANG salaries in the EU / UK can be nearly as high as in
| the US though, which in some locations does drive up the
| compensation for all SWEs.
| MauranKilom wrote:
| Based on StackOverflow dev survey, EU salaries are
| roughly 60% of what you get in the US. You'll be hard-
| pressed to find equivalent positions paying the same in
| both regions.
| cbg0 wrote:
| Are those 1:1 comparisons? I know typically in the US
| salaries advertised are not exactly take-home pay, but
| before tax amounts, and is some places in Europe salaries
| are advertised as take-home pay.
| MauranKilom wrote:
| Well it'll never be 1:1 due to differences in health care
| etc., of course, but those were all before tax from what
| I understood.
|
| Not sure how companies advertising take-home pay would
| work when your tax rate depends on e.g. marital status
| (at least in Germany it could be off by maybe a factor of
| 2 in both directions), which country/region are you
| thinking of there?
| acatton wrote:
| > It might sound weirdly low for someone in IT in the USA,
| but first, not everyone commands FAANG sales, and second,
| wages in the EU are comparatively low. With some seniority,
| you can rise to $100k relatively easily, but you have to
| sell your soul to either some consulting company or old
| Fortune-500 industries.
|
| Exactly.
|
| The non profit is registered in a small town of Maine-et-
| Loire.[1] Assuming this is close to where the developer
| lives, EUR42k goes a long way there. You also have to
| factor in that he doesn't have to take the Parisian Metro
| every morning and live in a tiny apartment for
| EUR1,000/month.
|
| [1] See the "Is Lichess a non profit?"
| https://lichess.org/patron
| robocat wrote:
| The $56k/EUR42k is before tax [p].
|
| Personally I would struggle to pay for a house, support
| dependants, and save for retirement on that amount.
| Partially because I went back to $zero in my thirties
| (although I know plenty of people in the same category
| much older... Trying to catch up is hard mode).
|
| [p] https://old.reddit.com/r/chess/comments/mpasyl/i_star
| ted_lic...
| hocuspocus wrote:
| > EUR42k
|
| Note that a competent full-stack Scala developer like
| Thibault can easily make EUR70-80k at a French company
| while working mostly/fully remote. And even more so going
| into contracting and/or working for foreign clients.
|
| He has his own reasons, working on his own thing being a
| huge one obviously, but he could definitely make more
| _and_ keep a similar lifestyle.
| [deleted]
| de6u99er wrote:
| I recall an AMA on Reddit, where the founder said he is
| perfectly fune with his salary as long as LiChess stays free
| and he can continue doing what he loves.
| ZephyrBlu wrote:
| I think the founder should have "fuck you" money, not just
| a reasonable salary.
| room271 wrote:
| You are projecting your own desires onto the founder
| (which is fine, but worth thinking about why they don't
| want the same thing as you). It seems clear that they are
| happy with their salary/work. For some people, more money
| beyond this is not a good thing.
| ZephyrBlu wrote:
| I'm not. It's not about having more money to spend, but
| having enough to be permanently secure.
|
| The founder could have FU money, still draw a ~50k/yr
| salary and keep their spending at the same level. The
| only difference is that if circumstances change the
| founder is still secure instead.
| hinkley wrote:
| If I could wave a wand and give you enough money to quit
| tomorrow, what would you do with yourself?
|
| What if your best friend were already doing his thing?
| Would you feel the urge to send me to talk to him, or is
| he good?
| ipaddr wrote:
| If you gave me enough money I would quit. Can you include
| some seed money for my new startup?
| ZephyrBlu wrote:
| I don't know what you second line means, but I would
| continue working. Possibly reduced hours, but still
| working.
| hinkley wrote:
| If you're already doing the thing you would do if you
| could do anything, do you still feel the need for "enough
| money" to walk out and go do it. I think, and some other
| posters seem to agree, that the answer is a qualified no.
| hobofan wrote:
| Well it seems like the founder doesn't want more money.
| Not everyone needs or wants "fuck you" money, and with
| that kind of salary you can afford a decent life in (most
| of) France.
| ZephyrBlu wrote:
| This is assuming that this stream of income doesn't ever
| dry up.
|
| I personally think that the founder should have enough
| money to never worry about money, or at least have a big
| buffer.
|
| If at some point in the future for whatever reason
| Lichess gets less donations, he could be screwed.
|
| On the other hand if he had a bit of a warchest he either
| has runway to increase revenue or to find another source
| of income.
| indigochill wrote:
| Then really Lichess should have FU money. This both
| secures his income as long as he continues working on it,
| then lets him hire a replacement whenever he decides to
| retire.
| ZephyrBlu wrote:
| Sure, it's up the founder of course. I think the they've
| created enough value to deserve that money for themselves
| and to use in any way they see fit though.
|
| Maybe that would be putting it back into Lichess when
| they retire or maybe after 10 years they decide they want
| to work on something else and they live off that money to
| do so.
| tonyedgecombe wrote:
| >If at some point in the future for whatever reason
| Lichess gets less donations, he could be screwed.
|
| No doubt they would get a job like the rest of us.
|
| The problem with your proposition is it can never be
| satisfied, you will never have enough.
| ZephyrBlu wrote:
| > _No doubt they would get a job like the rest of us_
|
| _" I personally think that the founder should have
| enough money to never worry about money, or at least have
| a big buffer"_
|
| > _The problem with your proposition is it can never be
| satisfied, you will never have enough_
|
| Where did you get this idea from? If you control your
| expenses (Like it sounds like the founder does) then the
| "never having enough" problem doesn't exist. At that
| point more money just means a larger buffer.
| seszett wrote:
| The man describes himself as a pastafarian antifascist
| and lichess as a hippie communist chess server. I don't
| think he has the same opinion on money as you do.
| acjacobson wrote:
| I would argue he already does. The entire point of "fuck
| you" money is that you are no longer beholden to someone
| else - it is not so much defined by the overall amount,
| but by the freedom it can buy you. He gets to work on
| what he loves doing every day doing it exactly the way he
| wants.
| ZephyrBlu wrote:
| My definition of FU money is that you have enough money
| to be secure no matter what.
|
| I think he would still rely on the month to month or year
| to year income rather than being completely secure.
| auggierose wrote:
| Nobody is completely secure.
| hinkley wrote:
| I'm currently trying to figure out if I wanted to work 20
| hours a month post-retirement, what sort of work that
| would look like.
|
| There are a handful of nature and nurture reasons that
| tell me that full retirement would likely be very bad for
| my health. And of course partial retirement I could start
| a little sooner.
| not1ofU wrote:
| The joy of FU money https://thedeepdish.org/fuck-you-
| money/
| [deleted]
| fionnohGoDeo wrote:
| Here's the AMA: https://old.reddit.com/r/chess/comments/mpa
| syl/i_started_lic...
|
| And the answer in question: https://old.reddit.com/r/chess/
| comments/mpasyl/i_started_lic...
|
| "That's my salary before income taxes. I think it's about
| right.
|
| Could I make more by selling my skills to the highest
| bidder? Probably.
|
| Would I be happier? Hell no.
|
| The way I see it, that's a lot money for a job I can do at
| my own rhythm from the comfort of my home. And instead of
| bosses or clients, I work for an awesome community."
| [deleted]
| nly wrote:
| Those secret costs seem extreme for something that's only
| serving a few millions websockets a day
| oli5679 wrote:
| It's interesting that he spends so little on servers.
|
| 1 billion chess games per year, often with >20k concurrent
| users and and some very heavy-duty engine analysis occurring
| for some proportion of these games and they only spends $56k.
|
| I have seen startups with only hundreds of customers spend 10x
| this on AWS by copying the fancy tools used by tech giants.
|
| It is also interesting how little the creator pays himself
| ($56k) and how much he spends on data protection ($40k), taxes
| ($52k) and various administration tasks. I wonder if his time
| is as heavily skewed towards administration as his expenditure.
|
| I would also like to meet this guy, buy him a beer/coffee and
| thank him for the value he has created:).
| segmondy wrote:
| Computers have been so fast for a good + 15yrs. If you don't
| use bloatware and pile on layers and layers of crap and with
| good system engineering it's amazing the amount of work you
| can compute for so little cost.
| [deleted]
| ponytech wrote:
| > I would also like to meet this guy, buy him a beer/coffee
| and thank him for the value he has created:).
|
| I had the chance to met him a few years back during a
| conference in France[1]. He is very friendly indeed.
|
| 1: https://mixitconf.org/en/2015/thibault-duplessis-lichess-
| org...
| ponytech wrote:
| There's a replay of this talk (from 2015) here:
| https://www.infoq.com/fr/presentations/lichessorg-open-
| sourc...
|
| Reminds me memories :)
| nly wrote:
| I had the opposite reaction.
|
| $1000/mo on a few frontend servers for only 20K concurrent
| users seems excessive.
|
| I've seen simple $40/mo droplets handle 50,000 concurrent
| websocket connections with minimal latency without breaking a
| sweat.
|
| $2000/mo on databases is also nuts, unless you're storing
| hundreds of terabytes at high redundancy levels.
| Eikon wrote:
| > $2000/mo on databases is also nuts, unless you're storing
| hundreds of terabytes at high redundancy levels.
|
| What? 300TB at 0,20e /GB which would actually be quite
| cheap for fast storage at high redundancy would cost 60
| 000e / month.
| nezirus wrote:
| I don't have enough details about the exact setup, but the
| server cost looks excessive* to me. Especially those Xeon Gold
| and Silver machines (are they using managed hosting or what).
| Almost all of them are in single OVH data center too, that's
| not very robust.
|
| * Compared to a certain German hosting provider, where I can
| get AMD EPYC 7502P with 128GB RAM for about 100EUR. Again don't
| know the arrangement, but with some effort they could add more
| servers, lower the cost and add Geo-resiliency.
| hutrdvnj wrote:
| "to a certain German hosting provider" Hetzner
| nezirus wrote:
| Yeah, don't want to provide free advertising (they don't
| need it), but they should be as reliable as OVH for hosting
| servers in Europe.
| yourad_io wrote:
| Until you get DDOSed and then they (Hetzner) null-route
| your server.
|
| They claim not to:
|
| https://twitter.com/hetzner_online/status/968085046073622
| 528...
|
| I do wonder if that is still the case.
|
| edit: Maybe not:
| https://community.centminmod.com/threads/any-personal-
| feedba...
| haskal wrote:
| Puzzle Streak/Storm/Racer are the only equivalents that Lichess
| lacked from Chess.com, but so happy to see them added (like 1-2
| months ago?)
|
| Lichess is responsible for most of my chess progress through
| matches, puzzles, analysis board. Excellent piece of software.
| sammy2244 wrote:
| They are paying way too much for their infrastructure
| [deleted]
| sireat wrote:
| I love Lichess (13k+ games and counting).
|
| It is a worthy alternative to chess.com model . There should be
| room for both.(chessbase.com, ICC, FICS are lesser alternatives
| now)
|
| That said this low pressure model only works when you are a lean
| shop(single developer proficient in Scala) AND have millions of
| users.
|
| Running a lean shop might be an admirable goal but millions of
| users is not for every project.
|
| There are thousands of worthy open source projects which struggle
| to give their creator sustenance through donations.
|
| The exceptions are few(Vue comes to mind).
| V-2 wrote:
| _" (chessbase.com, ICC, FICS are lesser alternatives now)"_
|
| I'd say that the main competitor of the two is now Chess24.
|
| It follows the subscription/premium model, taking it even
| further than Chess.com. Eg. the latter doesn't require you to
| be a paid user just to export a pgn of your own game - but
| Chess24 does.
| V-2 wrote:
| I meant the *former. Chess.com gives you access to the game
| record at least (even if its analysis functions are limited
| for free users). Chess24 doesn't
| qyi wrote:
| Just for clarification, are you talking about Vue.js?
|
| Just looked it up and people actually donate thousands of
| dollars to a JS project?
|
| https://opencollective.com/vuejs
|
| Crazy.
| kthejoker2 wrote:
| In a simple 2x2x2 matrix of
|
| * product aimed at specific audience / general audience
|
| * product is "one big idea" / a lot of little ideas
|
| * product requires long term engagement / short term engagement
|
| Only "specific audience" / "one big idea" / "long term
| engagement" can expect to - indeed, _must_ - thrive on patronage.
|
| The 7 other boxes are beholden to their users' fickleness.
| brainwad wrote:
| Wikipedia would seem to be general audience / big idea / short-
| term but survives on patronage.
| kthejoker2 wrote:
| True! :)
|
| I guess if your idea is "big" enough to attract an audience
| approaching the entire human civilization, you can survive
| short-term engagement :)-
| ece wrote:
| And it's not immune to editor and user fickleness.
| n_f wrote:
| lichess > chess.com
| greyman wrote:
| I use both, but what is chess.com better at is that they have
| grandmasters there you can learn from. That's the advantage of
| the commercial model - you can use the money to push things to
| a higher level. But overall I am on lichess more, since I can
| play crazyhouse against the computer there. :-)
| DoryMinh wrote:
| Why do you prefer lichess to chess.com?
| Petrova wrote:
| chess.com consistently lags for me why Lichess does not. I
| often lose completely winning positions because of the lag.
| wright08 wrote:
| Chess.com is super bloated, slow to load, and hard to
| navigate. There's so much noise on the screen compared to
| playing on lichess. Features are paywalled. For example if I
| want to know how the top players are responding to a certain
| sequence of moves, I can just see that on lichess. Also weird
| stuff is locked like using your own computer to analyze
| games. Also if you haven't been to the site for awhile you
| get a lovely modal again asking you for money. It's not that
| getting paid for services is bad, it's just awful when
| there's a better quality free service.
| V-2 wrote:
| Yes - not only features are limited and paywalled (fine,
| you need to keep the lights on), but they're nagging you
| about buying a subscription at every turn (now this feels
| intrusive to me).
|
| Their UI also feels clunky and dated: kind of like a 90s,
| or early 2000s desktop app.
|
| They do offer much more features, but most of them aren't
| even remotely essential to me: like a bazillion of bizarre
| chess variants (lichess has a few simple alternatives, but
| no stuff like 4-player chess etc.), or "personalized" bots
| to play against ("play against Beth Harmon"; it feels very
| Disneylandish to me), and so on.
|
| This being said, I don't mean to bash chess.com, it has
| certain advantages, and I do play on both websites. Still,
| lichess is my go-to, no-nonsense, default option.
| peter_retief wrote:
| I just had a quick game, thanks for keeping this going, I can
| donate a very small amount monthly, how do I do that?
| peter_retief wrote:
| Found the link its done.
| CynicusRex wrote:
| https://lichess.org/patron
| dna_polymerase wrote:
| Case in point, Slate Star Codex advertising used to be quite
| good. I remember it had these riddles from Jane Street, who where
| looking for people to hire this way.
|
| Also, because the ads were somewhat long running they weren't as
| intrusive and attention seeking like ever changing ad spots by
| Google or something. Saw them once, didn't bother me ever again.
| everyone wrote:
| Read that as "Why Liches will always be free"
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lich_(Dungeons_%26_Dragons)
| cushychicken wrote:
| Love that his posted description of lichess.org is "a hippie
| communist chess server for drug fueled atheists" lol
| phoinix wrote:
| Donating CPU time, is one thing unique on lichess compared to
| other websites. When there is a commercial website, why should i
| donate CPU for their CEO to put another digit on his payroll?
|
| Considering that ML and chess engines are now only starting, how
| about making a hybrid model of bitcoin mining and the cpu/gpu
| cost of analyzing chess games? That way one percentage of the
| energy consumed of the mining, on bitcoin or whatever, isn't
| immediately thrown out of the window.
|
| Or maybe making a hybrid model of analyzing the DNA of embryos to
| find defects, and bitcoin mining for the same reason. One fact
| not many people know is that economy in ancient Greece, was
| something women were doing. Men when there was something we
| wanted, we made wars. I foresee that there will be a digital coin
| like bitcoin that people will use, and that is gonna start from
| the women only. We, men, are not cut out like this, exchanging of
| goods in a peaceful manner.
| toolz wrote:
| > We, men, are not cut out like this, exchanging of goods in a
| peaceful manner
|
| I'm not sure what you're doing, but I've quite literally never
| exchanged goods in any other way but peacefully. I'd venture to
| say well over 99% of transactions done by either gender are
| peaceful in nature.
| phoinix wrote:
| Well not to wander off topic too much, but someone has to
| wonder, wall street which is male dominated, is it really
| doing economics, or maybe they are doing a form of war, a
| modern warfare? A rhetorical question, i don't have the
| answer, somebody else may has it. If it is so women will
| restart the economy by themselves, in some way, by creating a
| digital coin, embryocoin maybe. Chesscoin would be fun i
| guess too, but too many male players in chess.
| toolz wrote:
| crypto is male dominated as well so if wallstreet is war
| and crypto is peace - I'm not sure where you're pulling
| gender out as the interesting difference there.
| phoinix wrote:
| My point is that if we make a chesscoin for analyzing
| chess games, and embryocoin for analyzing the dna of
| embryos, the second one will prevail because women are
| more dedicated to that purpose than men are to anything
| else. That's all.
| fuzzer37 wrote:
| This guy is a crackpot
| [deleted]
| adenozine wrote:
| I'd really love for you to write this up in more detail.
| Do you have a blog or anything like that?
|
| You have a very unique viewpoint, I think you'd benefit
| from a longer-form text format to explain yourself in the
| clearest way.
|
| Not the person you were responding to, I'm just intrigued
| by these thoughts.
| toolz wrote:
| What data are you aware of that suggests women are more
| interested in analyzing DNA than men? I've worked on
| genomics projects and while I've not looked at industry
| data, my experience was that it was heavily male
| dominated.
|
| I simply don't see the reason gender in this context is
| even interesting, much less worthy of making assertions
| based on gender.
| foobarbecue wrote:
| What you're describing is a "proof of work" system, such as
| gridcoin.
|
| Men and women are not intrinsically different in the way you
| imply they are. That is culturally constructed.
| jonfw wrote:
| We're far from knowing enough about the brain to say anything
| as conclusive as that.
|
| We do know enough to say that there are some intrinsic
| differences- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroscience_of_se
| x_difference...
| foobarbecue wrote:
| Yes, there are some intrinsic differences, but not the ones
| phoinix implied. He went on to say that men are simply
| smarter than women, and so dang banned him. dang has got to
| be the best moderator I have ever seen.
| phoinix wrote:
| I didn't know about gridcoin. Thanks for that.
|
| However when i play chess the moment i smell that my opponent
| is female i immediately start playing more aggressively, and
| my opponent starts backs down. The statistics of the top
| chess players do prove me right. I have tried it myself many
| times. Against female players i don't try to play the
| objectively best move like usual, i consciously try to make
| the female player be afraid of their position and they lose
| by themselves.
| Jabbles wrote:
| The statistics of the top chess players proves you wrong.
|
| https://en.chessbase.com/post/what-gender-gap-in-chess
| phoinix wrote:
| Awesome article. I may be indeed wrong. It requires
| further research.
| phoinix wrote:
| I counted the women on the top 100 of Greece, it is only
| 3 women. India is a strange country to get statistics
| about. Women participation in Greece is double that of
| India for sure (the first country in the world to
| introduce woman voting), so 3% instead of the normal 12%
| someone would expect. Women underperform 4 times than
| men. A huge percentage. Women underperform always in high
| risk, high reward scenarios. Jordan Peterson have made
| many statistical researches in subjects like that. I was
| not wrong at last. But the article is very good.
| stefanmichael wrote:
| This is completely constructed in your mind. If you tried
| this vs any woman rated 100 points higher than you or more,
| this would be a death sentence. It has nothing to do with
| gender.
|
| Avoiding the objectively best move just means you're making
| inaccuracies and blunders, giving the game away for free.
| Nobody above 1200 rating is going to be "afraid of their
| position" that is not a thing. Below 1200 rating, there may
| be people like that due to inexperience, but it would be
| across both genders IF it existed at all which I'm
| completely unconvinced of.
| andrewzah wrote:
| That sounds like a personal problem, and not really gender
| related. You should ask yourself why you're having
| difficulties treating people the same especially in a game.
| phoinix wrote:
| Actually the statistics of the top players in every
| country or globally prove me right. Everyone does that.
| Of the top 100 players globally only one is woman. Men
| are smarter than women in general, but not that smarter.
| You can argue all day about the opposite, or downvote all
| you want, statistics proves me right. Reality is not
| something we hope for the santa claus to give it to us.
| Reality is what it is.
| dang wrote:
| That's beyond the pale, you can't do this here, and I've
| banned the account. Please see
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26916805.
| andrewzah wrote:
| Statistics are not inherently perfect. They completely
| ignore things like the environment, hostility towards
| women in the chess world, and do so on. Correlation is
| not causation and all that.
|
| The reality is that orders of magnitude more men play
| chess than women do. Not that men are inherently smarter.
| As more women play chess, we'll see a more even
| distribution of rankings.
| jgwil2 wrote:
| Play the board, not the opponent.
| dang wrote:
| We detached this badly-offtopic subthread from
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26913381.
|
| I was going to warn you that we ban accounts that post flamewar
| comments like you did repeatedly here. But
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26914792 is so beyond the
| pale that I've gone ahead and banned the account instead. You
| can't post like that to HN.
|
| If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email
| hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll
| follow the rules in the future. They're here:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
| PradeetPatel wrote:
| Excellent article. Serious kudos to the Lichess team on building
| and operating such a complex piece of software purely on
| donations.
|
| I think the most valuable lesson here for me is the understanding
| between the contributors and their key stakeholders. Because
| monetary gains and growth are not their KPI, they were able to
| maintain their software at their own pace.
|
| Thought exercise: Do you foresee this model staying if Lichess
| were to be acquired by another company?
| beforeolives wrote:
| I know you framed it as a thought exercise but it's unlikely
| they'll be acquired - https://lichess.org/contact#help-buy
| cassepipe wrote:
| "Lichess is a non-profit association in France"
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