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Why Lichess will always be free

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Re: Why Lichess will always be free

#401

Post by granshaw »

earthscienceman wrote: post #395
dang wrote: post #362

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 ju…

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 1…

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

Re: Why Lichess will always be free

#402

Post by dang »

earthscienceman wrote: post #395
dang wrote: post #362

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 ju…

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 1…

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.

> 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 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.

Re: Why Lichess will always be free

#403

Post by hooande »

earthscienceman wrote: post #395
dang wrote: post #362

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 ju…

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 1…

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.

Re: Why Lichess will always be free

#405

Post by luke2m »

V-2 wrote: post #251
luke2m wrote: post #232

Lichess is one of those examples where the open source alternative is actually the best and most well known.

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.

At my school anyway

Re: Why Lichess will always be free

#406

Post by ipaddr »

hinkley wrote: post #126
ZephyrBlu wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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?

If you gave me enough money I would quit. Can you include some seed money for my new startup?

Re: Why Lichess will always be free

#407

Post by thelean12 »

Zebfross wrote: post #384

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.

> 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.

Re: Why Lichess will always be free

#408

Post by dwaltrip »

littlestymaar wrote: post #176
matsemann wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 sk…

> 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 €70k, assuming he…

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 €70k. He might need to live in a major city though.

Re: Why Lichess will always be free

#409

Post by foobarbecue »

jonfw wrote: post #322
foobarbecue wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

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.

Re: Why Lichess will always be free

#410

Post by ipaddr »

V-2 wrote: post #251
luke2m wrote: post #232

Lichess is one of those examples where the open source alternative is actually the best and most well known.

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.

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.
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