lichess > chess.com
Why do you prefer lichess to chess.com?
chess.com consistently lags for me why Lichess does not. I often lose completely winning positions because of the lag.
Why Lichess will always be free
231–240 of 477 posts
Re: Why Lichess will always be free
#232Lichess is one of those examples where the open source alternative is actually the best and most well known.
Re: Why Lichess will always be free
#233Lichess 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.
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
Re: Why Lichess will always be free
#234Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 so…
"to a certain German hosting provider" Hetzner
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.
Re: Why Lichess will always be free
#235Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
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…
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!
Re: Why Lichess will always be free
#236Thibault 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.
Re: Why Lichess will always be free
#237The world needs Libackgammon!
Fibs.com ?
Re: Why Lichess will always be free
#238I used to have a coworker named Thibault, I wonder if this is the same guy.
Re: Why Lichess will always be free
#239Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
Tesla doesn’t run ads, as far as I know.
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!
Re: Why Lichess will always be free
#240Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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.
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.