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Lichess: Block Ads and Trackers

lichess.org

121–130 of 211 posts

Re: Lichess: Block Ads and Trackers

#121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Do you sometimes have trouble identifying traffic lights in photographs? Or perceiving character gestalts from distorted images? After you confirm your humanity to the best extent you can, proceed to reexamine your ethics.

Accusing people with different opinions of being less than human (or out of touch with humanity) only harms and does not help your argument.

Re: Lichess: Block Ads and Trackers

#122

Lichess is so fucking cool. It's easily one of my top inspirations for building a company "right." My favorite part of Lichess is their open financials. Check it out: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Si3PMUJGR9KrpE5lngSk... If you want to know the exact amount to donate to offset your gameplay - you can actually do that.

These types of businesses only work when they cater to a niche audience with a higher than average reasoning ability. Sucks, but it's still great when you find ones to be a part of!

Re: Lichess: Block Ads and Trackers

#123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

> Because it is? Ad blocking is arguably at least unethical. If all an ad was was a static image, I might agree. As it stands though, with RTB being what it is, ad blocking is the only means to protect yourself from a massive unethical, unconsensual breach of privacy.

Or boycott the sites. Or perhaps just boycott the risky capability like JavaScript.

Re: Lichess: Block Ads and Trackers

#124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

This stance is absurd. It's your device, you choose what content you want to consume on it. Do you imagine a world where you buy a monitor and once every hour it shows you fullscreen ads from the device manufacturer without your consent? Maybe you do, but for everyone else that's a dystopia.

I think you are overreacting

> This stance is absurd.

It's not 'absurd', because he did say "arguably", meaning that there's an argument to be made for either side of the issue (and a poster below makes an argument).

Pointing out that ad-blocking is arguably unethical is fine. If he had said "it's unarguably unethical", then sure, that's absurd, but the poster qualified his statement quite nicely.

Re: Lichess: Block Ads and Trackers

#125
post #48

> It's important to note that blocking ads is NOT theft. Don't fall for this creepy idea, which is the criminalisation of the inalienable right to privacy. This is something I've never actually focused on but it's wild the amount of people I've installed AdBlock and ublock for who think it's something nefarious.

[flagged]

Actually NOT blocking ads is at the very least morally evil and degenerate.

You are a very bad person if you think adverts are morally justifiable in any form.

Re: Lichess: Block Ads and Trackers

#126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Creating something good and open source is not a delusional dream imo. Whether it catches on is another matter. But even a relatively modest following is a very fine result. I first learned of lichess some years ago when I was looking to make my own chess UI and discovered their high quality open source chess library

The special thing about Lichess is not that it's good and open source, but that it actually pays an okay-ish salary to work on fulltime, while upholding all those lofty goals. It's an actual job. Without the whole thing being paid for by FAANG.

>but that it actually pays an okay/ish salary to work on fulltime, while upholding all those lofty goals.

He pays himself a fairly low salary for the work he is putting in.

Re: Lichess: Block Ads and Trackers

#127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kind of fascinating that their biggest cost is site moderation! This seems... odd for a site whose main mechanic really isn't social networking.

Chess players are some of the saltiest people on Earth, people can get really mean in chat. Also cheaters galore

The saltiness is much, much less than in some games (shooters, mobas) but a portion of every playerbase thinks they are the worst one even if they are not.

Re: Lichess: Block Ads and Trackers

#128

Lichess is so fucking cool. It's easily one of my top inspirations for building a company "right." My favorite part of Lichess is their open financials. Check it out: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Si3PMUJGR9KrpE5lngSk... If you want to know the exact amount to donate to offset your gameplay - you can actually do that.

I love this part.

In contrast, I barely watch Youtube, so getting premium doesn't make sense and I know that everytime I get an ad Google is getting less money than what I'd need to bid to skip the ad. I'd like to be able to have a money pool to outbid ads that would be shown to me and get a decent experience instead.

Re: Lichess: Block Ads and Trackers

#129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except if you look at their financials they are paying a huge tax being a French company. Their resources would go further if they left.

Not really. Taxes are so high because people get a lot of things for cheap/free like Healthcare and education. In countries where this isn't the case (USA for example) you'd easily pay 2 to 3 times the salary to get the same developer. In this case even only paying the main dev a US wage would be more than the taxes on everything.

[dead]

Re: Lichess: Block Ads and Trackers

#130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Nah. Now, I get that you're probably coming at this from "But hosting costs money and advertising is a way to recuperate the cost, so visiting the site but blocking ads is leeching bandwidth from the host without providing value back in the form of ad revenue". But this doesn't hold up. All the cards are held by the content provider. If they -actually- have a problem with this, they have ways to stop it. 1. A server…

One can enter physically a theater and watch a movie without paying quote often. Depending on the timing and staff you may not be confronted for a long time or at all.

Does that mean theaters don't really care or obligate consumers to pay?

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