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Why Lichess will always be free

lichess.org

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Re: Why Lichess will always be free

#331

Post by pbhjpbhj »

0xffff2 wrote: post #325
pbhjpbhj wrote: post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

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.

Re: Why Lichess will always be free

#333

Post by roenxi »

Chris2048 wrote: post #309
roenxi wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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.

Re: Why Lichess will always be free

#335

Post by [deleted] »

hocuspocus wrote: post #254
acatton wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 wher…

> €42k Note that a competent full-stack Scala developer like Thibault can easily make €70-80k 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]

Re: Why Lichess will always be free

#336

Post by cdelsolar »

bspammer wrote: post #327
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.

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 :)

Re: Why Lichess will always be free

#337

Post by cdelsolar »

zestros wrote: post #323
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.

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.

Re: Why Lichess will always be free

#339

Post by bogwog »

latexr wrote: post #162
pull_my_finger wrote: post #6

> 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/…

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”.

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!

Re: Why Lichess will always be free

#340

Post by boatsie »

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?
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