Lichess is free to use but they do post their expenses and they would appreciate support from the chess playing community.
Chess is booming and our servers are struggling
71–80 of 132 posts
Re: Chess is booming and our servers are struggling
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, I am with you on this. It isn't even the case that Lichess UI is simple because it lacks advanced features, it just straight up feels more intuitive and way more pleasant to interact with. Chess.com UI reminds me of overcluttered websites from late 2000s/early 2010s. Pure anecdata, but I only know one person irl who prefers chess.com, and I never managed to get a straight answer from him as to why, other than "…
Could easily go into a very long list of reasons as a long-time app/UX developer, but playing against the computer is a good starting point: on Chess.com as a beginner I was immediately able to play against a wide variety of AI's, each is given to you by their ELO strength, and they are tuned to have different personalities so you can practice against the different types. This is so much better than Lichess where you…
Reading the above (which is excellent) reminded me of reading a review of a Linux distro window manager setup vs MacOs.
Re: Chess is booming and our servers are struggling
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
>..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.
> Based on my daily frustrations with basically every piece of software, that already appears to be the status quo. That’s the kind of elitist thinking that leads to Byzantine tech interviews and poor collaboration.
Black and white thinking that leads people to decry "elitist thinking" is exactly a signal of a person I never want to work with, because such un-nuanced understanding of tradeoffs required to work on professional projects is demonstrably beyond their current understanding of things that do exist for good reason.
"Hacked together" is the software equivalent of fixing things with duct tape. It sounds cool and fun, and is fun to do for your own playthings, but it is a terrible mentality for developing solid projects.
Re: Chess is booming and our servers are struggling
#74> What does that mean? 250,000+ new accounts are being created each day. People are playing games (16,000 chess moves per second on average)
I remember reading how Dropbox and other file sharing sites used hashing to create single instances of popular files and then just used pointers from accounts with that file to save disk space.
I would imagine a LOT of chess games probably start out the same and you can therefore store a pointer to where the game is on a subset of potential game starts and then write the difference as you branch out.
I may be underestimating the possible start conditions and/or the metadata storage cost (e.g. time in the game of each move doesn't go away).
Re: Chess is booming and our servers are struggling
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I'm curious, as someone who appreciates the simple and intuitive Lichess UI, what makes the Chess.com UI better than Lichess'?
Some of the UI is really tiny on the smart phone version of the lichess app is my only complaint against their UI vs chess.com. As far as I'm concerned though they both could use a good designer. Neither of them are very good.
Besides that I tend to use, and pay for, chess.com more for their other features than for anything directly UI related. Their puzzles are better. I think their post game analysis is nicer to use, the way they do analysis in general is easier to use than lichess I think. They also have a lot of learning material.
As far as playing games go, I have friends who use both and therefor I play on both. It's about the same as far as I'm concerned.
Re: Chess is booming and our servers are struggling
#76It is worth remembering that by playing you give chess.com possibly thousands of games, each of which can be used against you at any time in the future.
Just if their cheating algorithm says so and they feel like making it public.
Re: Chess is booming and our servers are struggling
#77Chess.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.
> Similar to how most of the software that runs the internet is poorly written and has bad fundamentals.
Microsoft Teams? Good lesson to startups and companies in general.
Re: Chess is booming and our servers are struggling
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, I am with you on this. It isn't even the case that Lichess UI is simple because it lacks advanced features, it just straight up feels more intuitive and way more pleasant to interact with. Chess.com UI reminds me of overcluttered websites from late 2000s/early 2010s. Pure anecdata, but I only know one person irl who prefers chess.com, and I never managed to get a straight answer from him as to why, other than "…
Could easily go into a very long list of reasons as a long-time app/UX developer, but playing against the computer is a good starting point: on Chess.com as a beginner I was immediately able to play against a wide variety of AI's, each is given to you by their ELO strength, and they are tuned to have different personalities so you can practice against the different types. This is so much better than Lichess where you…
Worryingly, I disagree with your opinions despite your credentials. There's no accounting for taste, but then of course, all the carefully designed interfaces I don't like were made by people who thought they were great.
Re: Chess is booming and our servers are struggling
#79Chess has to be one of the easier games to scale up, no?
Good question. A web chess game is turn based with some basic logic to sync the clock. There are no secrets or complex state like many video games. Seems rather straightforward. The hard part is scaling up everything around it: - Stockfish real-time predictions - anti-cheat monitoring - the moderation tasks any social website needs
Anti-cheat monitoring can happen after the fact though, and Stockfish can run in-browser (there's a JS-compiled version of it).
Re: Chess is booming and our servers are struggling
#80> What does that mean? 250,000+ new accounts are being created each day. People are playing games (16,000 chess moves per second on average) I remember reading how Dropbox and other file sharing sites used hashing to create single instances of popular files and then just used pointers from accounts with that file to save disk space. I would imagine a LOT of chess games probably start out the same and you can therefor…
you probably can encode a whole board in a small-ish string, something you can put in a url hash. But chess game is also a history of moves.