Why Lichess will always be free

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.

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.

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.

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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.

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.

True! :)

I guess if your idea is "big" enough to attract an audience approaching the entire human civilization, you can survive short-term engagement :)-