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Chess is booming and our servers are struggling

chess.com

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Re: Chess is booming and our servers are struggling

#31

Post by randmeerkat »

tester457 wrote: post #25
slm_HN wrote: post #18

Chess.com has the somewhat unique property of being a chess server run by people who aren't good at chess and aren't good at technology. I think they used to hire devs off Fiverr. However they are somewhat good at business as they've convinced thousands of people to pay $17.00 per month for something that can be found for free at Lichess.org. They do pay a ton of money to streamers to use their site exclusively, whic…

Bad at the game, bad at engineering, but good at marketing. There's a lesson in here. Similar to how most of the software that runs the internet is poorly written and has bad fundamentals.

> Bad at the game, bad at engineering, but good at marketing. There's a lesson in here. Similar to how most of the software that runs the internet is poorly written and has bad fundamentals.

Maybe now we can get rid of Byzantine tech interview processes and instead just focus on hiring people that are capable of hacking things together.

Re: Chess is booming and our servers are struggling

#33

Post by wongarsu »

jsnell wrote: post #23
SanchoPanda wrote: post #6

Doubled since December, and held there? Unreal.

The Google Trends graphs support it: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&q=... https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&q=... None of their explanations sounds at all plausible though.

Individually the reasons given sound weak, but they make some sense if you see it as some self-reinforcing trend: the 2020 chess spike fueled by Corona and Queen's Gambit has put chess back into public consciousness and caused content creators to produce more chess content. That set the scene for the next wave, which was catalyzed by the cheating scandal bringing chess into mainstream media for a couple weeks, and creating narratives for people to follow. This has lead to chess related gifts and chess related social media posts, which reinforces the chess trend. Events like chess boxing probably helped, but are mostly a symptom of chess being more mainstream right now.

Re: Chess is booming and our servers are struggling

#34

Post by linkdd »

TurkishPoptart wrote: post #7

Lichess.org does everything Chess.com does but more, without needing to pay.

Lichess has less chess variants, less learning content (made by IMs and GMs), and has some gameplay differences:

  - on chess.com you can premove multiple times, each premove consume 0.1s on the clock
  - on lichess, you can premove only one time, but it does not consume time on the clock
Also the player pool being different, the rankings are not equivalent, and chess.com's player pool is bigger.

Also, from personal experience (so this is only anecdotal), the most toxic players (insulting in the chat, or ragequitting, ...) I met were on lichess.

Comments of the form "X is better than Y" are subjective and do not add any value/information to the discussion.

Re: Chess is booming and our servers are struggling

#35

Post by fbdab103 »

adam_arthur wrote: post #14

Chess has to be one of the easier games to scale up, no?

A complete chess game should be a very limited amount of data. I am finding conflicting reports that a typical chess game is 40 to 70 moves.

That being said, if any service suddenly saw a doubling of users within a month, plenty of sub-optimal architecture decisions can suddenly fall on their face which were otherwise adequate at the previous scale.

Re: Chess is booming and our servers are struggling

#36

Post by nwienert »

tester457 wrote: post #25
slm_HN wrote: post #18

Chess.com has the somewhat unique property of being a chess server run by people who aren't good at chess and aren't good at technology. I think they used to hire devs off Fiverr. However they are somewhat good at business as they've convinced thousands of people to pay $17.00 per month for something that can be found for free at Lichess.org. They do pay a ton of money to streamers to use their site exclusively, whic…

Bad at the game, bad at engineering, but good at marketing. There's a lesson in here. Similar to how most of the software that runs the internet is poorly written and has bad fundamentals.

The game reviews are really nice to quickly see the key points of the game. Plus the UI all over is better than Lichess. That and network effects explain the rest.

Re: Chess is booming and our servers are struggling

#37

Post by rom-antics »

urbandw311er wrote: post #29
TurkishPoptart wrote: post #7

Lichess.org does everything Chess.com does but more, without needing to pay.

I don’t mind paying for something particularly if it means the people who run it can make a living from it —- and hopefully ensure it’s still around in 10 years time.

Same here, that's why I pay for Lichess! https://lichess.org/patron

Re: Chess is booming and our servers are struggling

#38

Post by fbdab103 »

randmeerkat wrote: post #31
tester457 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bad at the game, bad at engineering, but good at marketing. There's a lesson in here. Similar to how most of the software that runs the internet is poorly written and has bad fundamentals.

> Bad at the game, bad at engineering, but good at marketing. There's a lesson in here. Similar to how most of the software that runs the internet is poorly written and has bad fundamentals. Maybe now we can get rid of Byzantine tech interview processes and instead just focus on hiring people that are capable of hacking things together.

>..focus on hiring people that are capable of hacking things together.

Based on my daily frustrations with basically every piece of software, that already appears to be the status quo.

Re: Chess is booming and our servers are struggling

#39

Post by sn9 »

tester457 wrote: post #25
slm_HN wrote: post #18

Chess.com has the somewhat unique property of being a chess server run by people who aren't good at chess and aren't good at technology. I think they used to hire devs off Fiverr. However they are somewhat good at business as they've convinced thousands of people to pay $17.00 per month for something that can be found for free at Lichess.org. They do pay a ton of money to streamers to use their site exclusively, whic…

Bad at the game, bad at engineering, but good at marketing. There's a lesson in here. Similar to how most of the software that runs the internet is poorly written and has bad fundamentals.

Is it being good at marketing or just having the obvious URL?

Or is that the same thing here?

Re: Chess is booming and our servers are struggling

#40

Post by bob1029 »

adam_arthur wrote: post #14

Chess has to be one of the easier games to scale up, no?

Replace chess with checkers and I think they'd still have ~90% of the same problems. This seems to be more about massive table/data growth than inherent complexity of the core business.
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