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Why Lichess will always be free

lichess.org

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Re: Why Lichess will always be free

#321

Post by pbhjpbhj »

cdelsolar wrote: post #303

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…

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.

Re: Why Lichess will always be free

#322

Post by jonfw »

foobarbecue wrote: post #278
phoinix wrote: post #273

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…

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.

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_sex_difference...

Re: Why Lichess will always be free

#323

Post by zestros »

cdelsolar wrote: post #303

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…

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.

Re: Why Lichess will always be free

#324

Post by phoinix »

aaronax wrote: post #317
phoinix wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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…

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.

Re: Why Lichess will always be free

#325

Post by 0xffff2 »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #321
cdelsolar wrote: post #303

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…

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.

>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?

Re: Why Lichess will always be free

#326

Post by pbhjpbhj »

jedimastert wrote: post #250
zimbatm wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 coll…

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

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?

Re: Why Lichess will always be free

#327

Post by bspammer »

cdelsolar wrote: post #303

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…

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.

Re: Why Lichess will always be free

#329

Post by ece »

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.

Re: Why Lichess will always be free

#330

Post by cdelsolar »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #321
cdelsolar wrote: post #303

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…

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.

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.
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