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Lichess: Block Ads and Trackers

lichess.org

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Re: Lichess: Block Ads and Trackers

#191

Post by matheusmoreira »

miki123211 wrote: post #79

> These don't benefit us, the website users, in any way Except for, you know, allowing those websites to exist in the first place? Ads and data are nothing but a form of payment, the gold or salt of the internet age. The alternative to ads isn't no ads, it's paywalls and subscriptions. If ads didn't exist or weren't as accurate as they can be with invasive tracking, we'd have far less content out there, and most of t…

Whatever. Let those spammy ad-funded web sites die. Nothing of value will be lost. It won't kill the web, it will fix it. Everyone should do their part to fix the web by driving advertising profits to zero.

The web was supposed to have real web sites made by real humans who actually have something to say. Not all this worthless ad impression maximizing clickbait spam. Remember, people used to pay for servers just to make their texts available over the internet. No one paid them for it.

Re: Lichess: Block Ads and Trackers

#192

Post by matheusmoreira »

robomartin wrote: post #61

I wish there was legislation to prevent TV manufacturers from turning TV's into ad-spewing digital signage in your home. It's completely out of control. Yes, sure, you can, in some cases, plug in an external streaming device and, depending on the system, side step their incredibly abusive home screens full of ads and tracking. This might not be 100% possible on all devices. More importantly, you paid good money for a…

Yeah, this is a serious problem with modern TVs. I've read that LG panels can be hacked but that was years ago. Maybe they patched whatever vulnerability was being exploited.

Re: Lichess: Block Ads and Trackers

#193

Post by charcircuit »

matheusmoreira wrote: post #190
charcircuit wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sites don't require advertisements around links to their sites. Once you follow a link (scent) to the destination that is when advertisements are shown in exchange for allowing you to access something of value. >Once you have served it to me, you don't get to dictate how I use it. If you do not have a license to modify the site that is copyright infringement.

> If you do not have a license to modify the site that is copyright infringement. Do I infringe copyright if I rip out the ads in a magazine and throw them in the trash?

Yes

Re: Lichess: Block Ads and Trackers

#194

Post by wirrbel »

patrickdavey wrote: post #109
wirrbel wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I play regularly on lichess. I got insulted a couple of times in the game chat. Looking at the scale of lichess, I am sure it adds up.

Have you looked at "Zen mode"? It removes the chat while you're playing ... you'll still see any insults after the game though ;)

I know Zen mode, however, most interactions are pleasant so I don't enable it by default, but typically when someone bothers me in the chat.

Re: Lichess: Block Ads and Trackers

#195

Post by lukhas »

stepupmakeup wrote: post #172
SeanAnderson wrote: post #6

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.

Question from someone who has zero knowledge about managing infrastructure: is all of that absolutely necessary? Only one is marked "we can afford to lose", but $228/mo for a monitoring server seems extremely excessive. Even $44 for "private communcations" (I'm assuming something like RocketChat) surely have cheaper alternatives?

Lichess sysadmin here!

We're self-hosting most of our infra on bare-metal, on the best price/quality hosting provider I know of (OVH). I doubt you could store ~1TB of metrics going back 4 or 5 years on fast NVMe storage for less than this in the cloud.

Re: Lichess: Block Ads and Trackers

#196

Post by lukhas »

marcrosoft wrote: post #15
treme wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

props to founders & gov of France that has special funding for such institutions.

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.

Lichess sysadmin (and trustee) here!

We're paying taxes on our employees, they're paid like regular French employees and therefore the employer is taxed accordingly. This is not income tax on our donations or swag sales.

I would prefer if the non-profit in France were "employer-taxed" less than for-profit companies, but no one seems to care.

Re: Lichess: Block Ads and Trackers

#197

Post by lukhas »

treme wrote: post #9
SeanAnderson wrote: post #6

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.

props to founders & gov of France that has special funding for such institutions.

(I'm a Lichess sysadmin & trustee)

So far France has given us exactly 0 euros and 0 cents, but has required us to hire and pay an accounting company to certify our books due to the level of donations we're receiving.

We could maybe argue that being allowed to exist as a non-profit is something France deserves kudos for, if you're in a good mood.

Re: Lichess: Block Ads and Trackers

#198

Post by lukhas »

spiderice wrote: post #89
Tmpod wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a very high salary in a lot of places, perhaps the developers don't feel the need to get 100k+/year...? .-.

That’s.. one way to look at it. Should read “perhaps the company doesn’t feel the need to give developers 100k+/year”.

Lichess is a non-profit with hundreds of volunteers, several part-time paid contributors/moderators and 2 full-time devs, not a company.

Re: Lichess: Block Ads and Trackers

#199

Post by lukhas »

ChicagoBoy11 wrote: post #38
digging wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Goes to show you how difficult and demanding moderation truly is, and why popular sites/services routinely fail to do it effectively. It's a quite proactive process.

That's an incredibly good point. I would think you'd need a pretty modest operation when it comes to that for a site like lichess, and the fact that it is the biggest expense really puts into focus the kind of scale the problem likely is at the bigger social media sites.

Nothing is modest at Lichess scale, we have a few million users, several thousand of them post in forums daily and chat with each other.

Also, we're a chess website with more than one million games per day, and some people like to cheat. We're classifying "fair play and anti-cheating" as "moderation" in our expenses because the two are intertwined.

Re: Lichess: Block Ads and Trackers

#200

Post by lukhas »

PUSH_AX wrote: post #105
SeanAnderson wrote: post #6

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 can't seem to find the income. Is this listed anywhere or is just the outgoing "open"?

It's not listed in this page because it varies month-by-month, but we publish our yearly books in a lichess blog post and on the government "Journal Officiel":

2022: https://www.journal-officiel.gouv.fr/pages/associations-deta...

2021: https://www.journal-officiel.gouv.fr/pages/associations-deta...

The TL;DR is that donations so far exceed our expenses, thanks to the generosity of our userbase, and thanks to the hundreds of volunteers doing work for free.

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