Why Lichess will always be free
lichess.org
lichess.org
Not only he is a very talented developer, he really sticks to his beliefs and made what Lichess is today.
He used to take up a job for a year or so, save money, and travel the world for a year or so until money runs out. Then he would come back to France and take up a new job. All working on Lichess during his free time.
For a few years now he has enough donation to pay himself enough money for his expenses, while he could have been a startup millionaire if he had decided to take a different path.
But he proved that you can have a successful non-profit, free of charge, free from ads service. Not just source code, but an actual service hosted with millions of users.
We need more people like Thibault.
Free/Libre software has been built thanks to principled people like him. It's truly a collective effort. And corporations started to slowly eroding it from within.
Joomla is open source and their devs make so much money selling plugins and widgets. Who is the best man for the job to tweak the platform than the developers who made the open source core of it?
I use lichess everyday for years, the stability of the platform is absolutely top notch. An absolute minimal amount of bugs, no glitches in the website, every page i click on, loads instantaneously. The commercial website Chess24 and closed source, doesn't have "ultrabullet' games, very quick games of 15 seconds, because their platform cannot support it. lol
Eventually you end up with a load of staff who are dependent on the thing for their livelihoods, and that influences decision-making. Next up is selling to a company with big resources "to empower us to complete the original vision" and soon after a new scrappy upstart releases their free alternative, to start the cycle again.
I think the future of education is portraying it as a game, history as a game, engineering as game etc and solving puzzles along the way. Lichess as a platform may be useful in that regard, because a game to be enjoyable doesn't need to have all the fancy 3d graphics.
It seems like every financially successful developer out there came from a middle/upper class enviornment.
Once they smell money, it's always more, more, and more. If the get big enough they blame it on their shareholders?
Guys like Thibault are a different breed. They are rare. I have a feeling his payoff will be huge in the future, and it will be a combination of respect, and a fulfilled guilt free life.
I don't feel like arguing. Their must be few Horatio Algers out there banging away, and just want a comfortable life. It just seems like most people that's never ever enough once they get the whiff of financial opportunity. I truly believe Zuckerburg could have had a legitimate shot at running for president if it wasn't for greed. (He pondered running a few years ago with calculated photo op trips to the midwest.)
I think this is more likely evidence of how many advantages being brought up in those environments gives in becoming financially successful. Not having to worry about paying for college, for example, leading to having more seed funding to be able to start working on your own projects, and potentially even having relatives provide that funding directly.
Even then, only the greedy find major success. Make the cost of living lower, and you see more successful people, specifically more guys like Thibault who are willing to do thinks the right way.
I worked to pay for my tuition, and like many millennials, discovered this was insufficient, and had to take out loans. Eventually the financial exposure was too great so I dropped out because I couldn't afford it anymore and found a job writing code
And now I'm middle class, myself.
But I'm middle class for flyover country. If you don't have to worry about paying for college, because your parents can afford it out of pocket, I've got news for you: you're not middle class. You're RICH.
Europe, most likely... You know, those socialist countries where there is still a middle class.
Been working on the learning community for about 5 years now.
I’ve saved up enough for a year, will be quitting In 2 weeks to go back to teaching and improving the experience and teach more students about good engineering practices.
What we need is a system that incenctivises people like Thibault, rather than incentivise people to develop nastier ways to make people click on ads :)
It has been growing steadily and we're about to hit 400K games played; it's the site of choice for the streaming community and we just finished hosting the World Blitz Championship this past week :)
Thibault is sort of my hero. We've talked about doing some sort of cross-promotion but I'd like to polish our app a bit more before I follow up again.
... so much better than the vision for the future coming from the powerful technocrats living in silicon valley, the primary users of HackerNews. The future is for the people.
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 just like themselves. I think it's important to realize this. How can we function as a community if people are suspecting and/or putting down everybody else who's here?
While it might be true that the demographics of the site are 10% SV residents, I do sense a very existent divide here in the interests of the users of this site. And while my initial comment might not have perfectly followed the guidelines, I do often think it's important to push-back against the "money-above-all" culture that often steers this website, or at least the culture that underpins a lot of the discussions.
I think, as the site is founded by a VC firm, there is inherently a large subset of users that are money driven technocrats. And more substantially, I think the resulting culture is a barrier to the actual substance of discussions here and to the impact of discussions/technology/startups/VCs/etc in general. And I broadly disagree with the perspective on community, society, money, and finance that the founders of YCombinator espouse. Views that are also shared by a portion of the user-base here.
Let me label these two communities that I believe there is a barrier between: "FOSS-ers" and "startup-ers". I hope these labels are transparent enough that I don't even need to clearly define them. Thus, what I think that I'm trying to comment on, is that there is a real divide between these communities. Is there common ground? Absolutely. Am I willing to tolerate the "wealth-at-all costs" attitude that is pervasive here? Absolutely not. I think it's toxic and damaging to civil society and I think we're bearing that out at this exact moment in time. And I see HackerNews as an awkward, sometimes beautiful, ground-zero.
Now, to be expressly clear with my position: I'm not anti-capitalism. I wouldn't even call myself a socialist. After all "socialism", as the word is colloquially used in the Anglo world (aka European EU-style socialism), is really just capitalism where some of the taxes are expressly earmarked for broad reaching social programs. I believe in competition and I believe in providing rewards to the people who are willing to take risks and create things in the world. I think that's fantastic.
But I am suspicious of some users here. I think the actions of many VC firms, YC startups and their founders, and the resulting discussions on HN, border very often on anti-social. I don't believe Paul Graham's hypothesis that large sums of wealth aggregated via consumer capitalism is best used by VCs to create good in the world. It's typically used to acquire more wealth via blind consumer-oriented companies, with the occasional benevolent passion project. That wealth in the hands of a sufficiently/correctly motivated government, an institution created to serve the people, would create far more good and is a much better place for that money.
I quite plainly believe that much more good would be created in the world using technology if these people had stricter morals, less money, and less selfish goals. I also believe that their wealth is inherently oppressive, as it bequeaths power to be even more selfish... and motivates others to follow suit. Something I think should be discussed here on this website.
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Now, I know that I'm riding the lines of the comment guidelines here. 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 suppose I'll find out in your response.
Thanks for all your effort here dang.
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
> 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.
I appreciate the correction of primary, I agree it's an unnecessary broad characterization. I also understand your concern with the "distancing" you're referring to, however:
I think there's a subtle line between being willing to engage with someone the way you speak of and tolerating behavior that is socially toxic. If there's something I feel like has been learned over the last 30 years, it's that some portion of the population (the term "privileged" is often used here) are enabled by society to be deaf in their actions and the impacts of those actions on others. Whether the "privilege" causing their deafness be power that is rooted in money, race, or simply being member of a majority in some sense... the impact is the same. They need to be hit over the head with the mirror of what they are creating and, yes, sometimes that action is a bit emotionally violent. Or, in your language, sometimes that requires creating a characterization/image of their actions which can sometimes look similar to what you are calling distancing. I think the unfortunate simple difference between being unnecessarily divisive in your commentary (which I think is a summary of what you're asserting I've done) and calling people out for their bad behavior... is simply whether your characterization of their behavior is accurate or not. I hope I'm being fair and accurate and I think you've done a good job in pointing out the ways I was not.
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.
I read a lot of the conversation here every day and I've read a lot of the statements from the current leadership of YCombinator. And I think it's a gross attempt to undermine the discussion by asserting that I must not read anything because I could only be so wrong if that were true.
While I understand your comment that HN is a diverse site, and you are very correct there, I am not trying to make all of HN my opponent in this debate. I'm very plainly, although maybe I did poorly, hoping to make an opponent of a specific -- and in my opinion very common -- mindset on HN. With the goal of deconstructing it and ideally maybe even dismantling it.
To that end, I don't agree at all the YC leadership is doing a meaningful job of actually addressing sustainability via their practices as a business. I have read the words that you're referring to, which IMO are aimed at discussing sustainability. However, their practices are in direct opposition to those ideas. The startups they fund, the businesses they push to IPOs, and the monologues that they write on their blogs are far-more-often-than-not geared toward one goal: making money and expanding YC and the reach of tech related businesses, IMO without much regard for the impact it has on the world. I recognize that this is an opinion, and you pretty obviously aren't sympathetic to it, but it's fairly empirical in terms of substantive projects that YC has pushed hardest financially/philosophically. It's also empirical in terms of the replies on major posts, particularly the entrepreneurial ones.
And because you've implied this is off topic on a post about lichess, I should also clarify: I see the goals and accomplishments of lichess to be worth even more when juxtaposed against these YC culture. Especially knowing that someone like ornicar faced a very real choice when deciding to pursue lichess as his primary endeavor. I think he deserves to be applauded not only on his own, but also in that context. I also think it's no coincidence he is from France. Les français sont beaucoup plus à l'aise dans l'idéalisme, il me semble.... surtout par rapport aux américains. Mais pourtant ça sert aussi à créer son propre ensemble de "problèmes uniquement français"
(link just goes to guidelines site which does not discuss demographics)
If I can be so bold as to offer one criticism of your site though, it was a bit confusing when I first clicked to look at it. The first page is a barrage of information none of which seemed relevant for my first visit. I clicked the links at the top of the page and ended up on completely different web sites with equally confusing first pages.
Eventually I did click and watch a scrabble game being played, which looked great!
Sure enough, a global search showed that you're using history.replace() to change the URL path. I can totally appreciate the likely trepidation about the work required to correctly juggle the JS history stack, but... it's very disorientating to see the back button greyed out :)
I know it'll get fixed eventually, but I crashed into it within 6 seconds. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Also, it would be kind of cool to be able to watch active games, but the current UI doesn't really surface activity in any way. Adding this would naturally attract ebb and flow and interesting oscillatory behavior (with lots of people randomly joining and leaving) and whatnot, but it would also allow for actual large-scale spectation, and the general appearance of a site that's a Destination™ and a flurry of activity.
(While probably obvious, I've just thought that recency (what's being played right now), activity (what's attracting the most chat and the most frequent/periodic/consistent movement), and volume (what has the most eyes on it) would all play a role in ranking.)
I thought Mattel only allowed their own online games to be called "Scrabble" RTM.
Disclaimer: this is personal opinion and relates in no way to my employment.
I see this quite a bit on HN and I always thing it's silly, but this time it's particularly perplexing. Are you a lawyer for Mattel or something?
My employer thinks I shouldn't comment on social media at all because people might think I'm commenting in an official capacity. Their line is "don't use social media", so if there's a comment where an argument could be leveled against me that "people think this is a part of your employment" I indemnify myself against that argument.
It's not unlike acknowledging the owner of a trademark, no-one can soundly claim people would think you own a mark if you point out you don't and name who does.
I don't work for Mattel, fwiw.
Perhaps there needs to be an account disclaimer checkbox as a standard feature: "I speak in no official capacity related to any employer or professional role"....
I've never identified myself as an employee of my company on this account and I'm certainly not identifying myself as an employee of my company in this post, so since I don't work for the NSA, I post whatever I want, no disclaimer necessary.
If for some reason I did want to identify my employer sometimes, it would make infinitely more sense to make a separate account for those times than to attach a meaningless boilerplate disclaimer to every single post I make on Hackernews.
I work at a company with a social media policy. My understanding of it (garnered by clicking through the slides as quickly as humanly possible once a year) is that they only want me to consider these sorts of disclosures if I'm speaking in a capacity where people MIGHT mistake what I say as coming from the company.
My employer is certainly discoverable from my HN account but there's no more value in me adding such boilerplate to my HN posts than there is me signing emails with my mom the same way.
I know lichess invests a lot of energy into catching cheaters, is that something you've had to look into? I imagine it's much harder to catch cheaters than in chess.
The algorithms have been successful at catching a nontrivial number of cheaters already, most of whom have admitted it and gotten their account back after a suspension.
It is a super cool problem - I think we can catch more with machine learning (the funny thing is, my day job is in fraud detection using machine learning, so there is some overlap :)
Maybe add more of a header section to explain the game or have a picture of what it looks like in a game?
Funny enough, I’ve donated around $30 in total which is $30 more than I would’ve ever thought of spending on a chess site. Hats off to thibault and the open source community for creating such a wonderful gem.
Here is the direct link: https://lichess.org/patron
PS: I also donated a few month of CPU time to fuel their Game Analytics a while ago: https://lichess.org/help/contribute
Another way to help is to host an analysis server[0]. I give them one core of my old i3-5100. It’s easy to setup, and I like knowing that it’s chugging away 24/7.
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Si3PMUJGR9KrpE5lngSk...
I hope OVH would donate some compute/machines to lichess. It would help lichess a lot financially. It would be good publicity for OVH and I think it would be a drop in the ocean on their balance sheet.
I think you were saying it's cheap relative to the impact it has. I agree. But "holy hell that's expensive" is an entirely accurate reaction for someone who wants to fund it out of pocket.
(Gwern covers our TPU/ML infrastructure costs for around $350/mo, and I wince that I wasn't able to optimize it cheaper.)
"French taxes" is $53k, which is nearly equal to their server fees. Wow.
Props to them for however they manage to get $400k/yr for a free project with no business model, and no intended business model. (I'm serious; it's a wonderful thing for the world, and a tremendous example of what people can achieve without having a monetary focus.)
(edit: originally posted this as a top level comment but felt it fit better here)
Edit2: just checked. I've spent 11 whole days playing chess there (and not sure if that only counts games and not tactics etc). Made my first donation now.
I personally think that the founder should have enough money to never worry about money, or at least have a big buffer.
If at some point in the future for whatever reason Lichess gets less donations, he could be screwed.
On the other hand if he had a bit of a warchest he either has runway to increase revenue or to find another source of income.
Maybe that would be putting it back into Lichess when they retire or maybe after 10 years they decide they want to work on something else and they live off that money to do so.
No doubt they would get a job like the rest of us.
The problem with your proposition is it can never be satisfied, you will never have enough.
"I personally think that the founder should have enough money to never worry about money, or at least have a big buffer"
> The problem with your proposition is it can never be satisfied, you will never have enough
Where did you get this idea from? If you control your expenses (Like it sounds like the founder does) then the "never having enough" problem doesn't exist. At that point more money just means a larger buffer.
I think he would still rely on the month to month or year to year income rather than being completely secure.
There are a handful of nature and nurture reasons that tell me that full retirement would likely be very bad for my health. And of course partial retirement I could start a little sooner.
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.
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?
And the answer in question: https://old.reddit.com/r/chess/comments/mpasyl/i_started_lic...
"That's my salary before income taxes. I think it's about right.
Could I make more by selling my skills to the highest bidder? Probably.
Would I be happier? Hell no.
The way I see it, that's a lot money for a job I can do at my own rhythm from the comfort of my home. And instead of bosses or clients, I work for an awesome community."
This is probably the root of most of tech's angst: people thinking they're entitled to get rich just because they made /run something.
If you can live comfortably doing something as rewarding as making something like Lichess, what more can you really want? People are talking about FU money/financial independence, which I agree is nice, but you can totally get there on $58k/year by living below your means and investing.
The reason I say it leads to angst is when you expect more than a comfortable salary, you're imposing a higher financial burden on the overall system than necessary, which can sometimes work in the short term, but in the long term introduces drag on development/stability because those extra thousands you're personally socking away aren't going towards, say, getting a contractor to address little issues or going into the rainy day fund.
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 skilled enough to make something similar would rather work for a higher salary.
So it's more a sigh from me, that I'd wish more people would be able to sustain making and giving away something great like this, without having to sacrifice money. Why should optimizing ad clicks give you millions, but making this only thousands?
You know, in the same way there often are discussions here about making open source income viable. It would be better for everyone if these unsung heroes got more than just praise. Then others would follow suit.
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 wanted to work in Paris[1] (or maybe Lille or Lyon), and if he lives anywhere else in France, he's probably already earning as much as he could wish, and he's working one something that matters to him. I would totally take such a deal.
[1] Ok, this is probably way less relevant nowadays, since covid made remote work mainstream for most of us, but remote work was barely imaginable in most French company before the pandemic came.
But people get distracted by things they “can afford,” the amount of money they “need” ratchets way up, and they find themselves missing out on things and making compromises anyway.
If you have already found a thing or two that makes you happy, you don’t need to hedge so much. You don’t have to keep trying to stuff things into a hole in your chest trying to fill it up.
Many, many of my parents’ problems went away when one of them started making over $50k a year. If they had been more content then it would have solved many more. Adjusted for inflation that’s a bit more than $58K today, but if your spouse is doing well enough, that’s still perfectly workable. If your health holds.
I agree it's low for someone running the whole show, but then he is doing it as a non-profit.
Tech salaries in the US are really high compared to RoW, even once CoL is taken into account.
It might sound weirdly low for someone in IT in the USA, but first, not everyone commands FAANG sales, and second, wages in the EU are comparatively low. With some seniority, you can rise to $100k relatively easily, but you have to sell your soul to either some consulting company or old Fortune-500 industries.
So could be the dev takes an above-avg wage which would be around junior to semi experienced level developer and just does what they want to do: build a chess community.
EDIT: I don't fully understand the tax part, but if the nonprofit also pays his taxes and he goes out with $54k net, he's doing very, very well for an EU country. I've just reached that level give or take and I have lots of seniority in a really profitable old economy country. If I would be gunning higher, I'd have to do consulting or go the people management track.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_European_countries_by_...
Not sure how companies advertising take-home pay would work when your tax rate depends on e.g. marital status (at least in Germany it could be off by maybe a factor of 2 in both directions), which country/region are you thinking of there?
The one I used to work for had a real problem of developers leaving for the US on an internal transfer after 12 months, precisely because of the salaries.
Exactly.
The non profit is registered in a small town of Maine-et-Loire.[1] Assuming this is close to where the developer lives, €42k goes a long way there. You also have to factor in that he doesn't have to take the Parisian Metro every morning and live in a tiny apartment for €1,000/month.
[1] See the "Is Lichess a non profit?" https://lichess.org/patron
Note that a competent full-stack Scala developer like Thibault can easily make €70-80k at a French company while working mostly/fully remote. And even more so going into contracting and/or working for foreign clients.
He has his own reasons, working on his own thing being a huge one obviously, but he could definitely make more and keep a similar lifestyle.
Personally I would struggle to pay for a house, support dependants, and save for retirement on that amount. Partially because I went back to $zero in my thirties (although I know plenty of people in the same category much older... Trying to catch up is hard mode).
[π] https://old.reddit.com/r/chess/comments/mpasyl/i_started_lic...
* Compared to a certain German hosting provider, where I can get AMD EPYC 7502P with 128GB RAM for about 100EUR. Again don't know the arrangement, but with some effort they could add more servers, lower the cost and add Geo-resiliency.
They claim not to:
https://twitter.com/hetzner_online/status/968085046073622528...
I do wonder if that is still the case.
edit: Maybe not: https://community.centminmod.com/threads/any-personal-feedba...
1 billion chess games per year, often with >20k concurrent users and and some very heavy-duty engine analysis occurring for some proportion of these games and they only spends $56k.
I have seen startups with only hundreds of customers spend 10x this on AWS by copying the fancy tools used by tech giants.
It is also interesting how little the creator pays himself ($56k) and how much he spends on data protection ($40k), taxes ($52k) and various administration tasks. I wonder if his time is as heavily skewed towards administration as his expenditure.
I would also like to meet this guy, buy him a beer/coffee and thank him for the value he has created:).
I had the chance to met him a few years back during a conference in France[1]. He is very friendly indeed.
1: https://mixitconf.org/en/2015/thibault-duplessis-lichess-org...
Reminds me memories :)
$1000/mo on a few frontend servers for only 20K concurrent users seems excessive.
I've seen simple $40/mo droplets handle 50,000 concurrent websocket connections with minimal latency without breaking a sweat.
$2000/mo on databases is also nuts, unless you're storing hundreds of terabytes at high redundancy levels.
What? 300TB at 0,20e /GB which would actually be quite cheap for fast storage at high redundancy would cost 60 000e / month.
It’s also a great example of something born of and sustained by a community: a testament to the chess demography.
It is a worthy alternative to chess.com model . There should be room for both.(chessbase.com, ICC, FICS are lesser alternatives now)
That said this low pressure model only works when you are a lean shop(single developer proficient in Scala) AND have millions of users.
Running a lean shop might be an admirable goal but millions of users is not for every project.
There are thousands of worthy open source projects which struggle to give their creator sustenance through donations.
The exceptions are few(Vue comes to mind).
I'd say that the main competitor of the two is now Chess24.
It follows the subscription/premium model, taking it even further than Chess.com. Eg. the latter doesn't require you to be a paid user just to export a pgn of your own game - but Chess24 does.
chess24 https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCkTCNuQ2mGfW6-SpHpaze_g/vid...
en español https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCTzRQxC3i7GOT4jtiTq4e0w/vid... (Divis, el Fo, Niño Anton etc)
For years I played online a lot, but I gave up playing (it's too easy to play all night!) and just watch tournaments. Also banter blitz, on the chess24 channels, with e.g. Dubov, Grischuk, So, Radjabov, Karjakin, Nepo etc etc, not to mention Magnus, is amazing—hearing first-hand how the strongest players think. It's not always fun playing chess, but it's always a lot of fun watching! Every second.
[0] St Louis youtube channel, except for major tournaments, which they do very well, is super-lame compared to years ago when Yasser, Ben Finegold etc were regularly doing video lectures.
Just looked it up and people actually donate thousands of dollars to a JS project?
https://opencollective.com/vuejs
Crazy.
I think the most valuable lesson here for me is the understanding between the contributors and their key stakeholders. Because monetary gains and growth are not their KPI, they were able to maintain their software at their own pace.
Thought exercise: Do you foresee this model staying if Lichess were to be acquired by another company?
https://lichess.org/terms-of-service
This seems rather an odd arrangement. Does anyone have any insight here?
As to why English law, and not, say, New York or New South Wales law, well: England is only 21 miles from France.
Citation needed. Both civil law and common law seem to have their respective pros and cons. At least my understanding of common law is that in common law you need to be familiar with all past related cases dating back to who knows when, which doesn't exactly make interpreting and understanding the terms of a contract any easier.
Get a judge having a bad day in France and your case could go belly up regardless of merits, customs or precedent.
“Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.” So why retread the same legal wheel over and over? Why not study prior similar cases to at least see if they thought of something you didn’t?
You're spreading FUD. 1) Few civil actions are decided in a day. 2) You can almost always appeal a decision. 3) Statutory law in Civil Law countries tends to be much more detailed and comprehensive (compared to statutory law in Common Law countries), precisely because no one likes to "retread the same legal wheel over and over", so law makers at some point decided to codify what already was (or was supposed to become) common practice. So judges have much less wiggle room in their decision than you and OP are implying.
This is also the reason why "commercial agreements drafted in civil law countries tend to be rather brief […] since there is no reason to restate codified law"[0].
Is it usual for French organisations to apply English law?
Lichess is responsible for most of my chess progress through matches, puzzles, analysis board. Excellent piece of software.
Carlsen, on Lichess, against other GMs and FMs.
Though, I disagree on the restaurant analogy. Not being open-source isn’t the lack of willingness to share the ingredients. It’s choosing not to share the recipe, which is almost every restaurant.
Heck, they have no moat! Anyone can just walk in, use their source code, and set up their own free chess site!
I'm sure this is all great for chess lovers and the game of chess as a whole, but what about all of the investors who will never have the thrill of a 10% IPO pop?
It just seems kind of selfish to make such an amazing site and then not try to cash in on all that value.
* product aimed at specific audience / general audience
* product is "one big idea" / a lot of little ideas
* product requires long term engagement / short term engagement
Only "specific audience" / "one big idea" / "long term engagement" can expect to - indeed, must - thrive on patronage.
The 7 other boxes are beholden to their users' fickleness.
I guess if your idea is "big" enough to attract an audience approaching the entire human civilization, you can survive short-term engagement :)-
It's weird that web advertising is utterly terrible and toxic but I am actually nostalgic for print ads from Fry's Electronics (rip). They were one of my favorite parts of print newspapers.
Old computer magazines also had great advertisements.
Also, because the ads were somewhat long running they weren't as intrusive and attention seeking like ever changing ad spots by Google or something. Saw them once, didn't bother me ever again.
Our World in Data in run by Oxford University, so outside of EU. The applicability of EU GDPR laws outside EU is a complicated topic.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Data_Protection_Regula...
https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/dp-at-the-end-of-the-tr...
If you are big (like this site here) you have lawyers so you also don't worry about it.
They also mention kfchess, which I didn't know about, and other open source educational, puzzle, variant chess sites and the lc0 engine based on AlphaZero.
If you're the head of a successful OSS project and you believe it's helping your career in the way of industry notoriety, good demo work to show potential employers, etc.—then give a cut to cover the project's expenses, or even hire folks for freelance work.
There might be stretches when you're not going to make any extra money from the project; say you've reached the point where the project isn't a top line-item in your resume and is probably not responsible for your next salary bump. You can still honor what you've gotten from the project by voluntarily investing back a portion of the money. It has a "benefit corporation" flavor.
If this sounds like too much generosity to expect of people, consider people like Thibault. He's very, very deep into the "generous" side, in that pretty clearly he could work on the project _far_ less and still get a dream job. What I'm describing is a way to make an overall profit and still feel like you're giving back to the world by nurturing the project you've built.
Obviously, this is an overwhelmingly common thing in practice already, whether it's someone who made an OSS project to get a good job and then continued to work in their spare time to maintain it, or language BDFLs who maintain the project on a volunteer basis, but as a result of founding the language they have amazing and well-paying day jobs. But so far I've never seen it described as an actual business model, where you can feel great about helping to keep up your project, but still come out ahead overall.
I've got one or two game designs of my own that I could probably make something like this with, but it didn't really click I could use this code as a reference until then.
I do have other game designs I'm working on and a different version of the game I'm thinking of that is aimed at a bit more of a casual audience (even putting Twitch streamer friendly things in there), but I do hope to get to a point where there can be some real data on how to play well in the game, and it is basically a board game anyway (I have a physical prototype for the board game version made, but it's never been published).
Lichess has been live for over a decade, they are a proven success.
Edit: Just played a game, my ID was still active and my last game was in 2012!
> Imagine if scientists kept the result of every scientific study to themselves. The same work would have to be done over and over again as everyone was forced to reinvent the wheel countless times to do anything at all. Instead, scientists share their work and collaborate which benefits all of us.
raised my eyebrows. If only it were true. Aside from paywalled journals, we don't have a centralized repositories of data in most fields, probably because a lot of it is proprietary (or intends to be) in the first place.
If there are things that could make Lichess way better but require resource they don't have, they should weight the pros and cons.
The cost is a worst user experience. The benefit is money.
For a non-profit, money is a mean and not an end. Resource will be used to achieve a purpose. Maybe in some cases the benefit can outweigth the cost.
That's really just something we tell ourselves to feel better about serving ads. It doesn't actually match reality.
(b) doesn't this assumes that having $1 billion is much more valuable than being an instrumental part of an online community which brings so much happiness to so many people
(c) wealth has diminishing returns (in terms of material circumstances) and the person who runs this doesn't seem to be after power
- lidraughts.org
- lishogi.org
Yes, ratings can't be compared between different pools. Different rating systems can perform with different accuracy, though:
Which rating system is best?
The purpose of rating systems is to predict the outcome of games. Therefore, they can be objectively better or worse, according to their ability to make such predictions. Glicko 1 makes better predictions than Elo, and Glicko 2 makes better predictions than Glicko 1
* Online chess typically uses Glicko ratings (this applies to Lichess and chess.com alike), FIDE ratings are based on Elo
* Online ratings are typically blitz ratings - people tend to play fast games online. Obviously FIDE has blitz ratings too, but over the board chess is mostly standard time control, and that's what's typically referred to as a FIDE rating. A lot of people with standard FIDE rating don't even have a blitz one, because OTB blitz tournaments are arguably rare.
While I share the loathing of modern Ads as a service or whatever the technical name for giving Google/Ad Choices a blank check to serve whatever they want on a piece of your web real estate, I think you can certainly put up a banner or something responsibly. If I run a web dev blog and I put a banner for my VPS that has a my referral code, or I come to an agreement with said VPS to show an ad for guaranteed credit or I just sell the space directly to XYZ company that is relevant to my users I think that is a legit way to get a little income without burdening my users.
If Lichess decided to promote some chess books or software on their page to supplement their donations, I would be OK with that as long as it's done tastefully and responsibly.
Literally the last thing I did before posting this comment was email a link to a Facebook in-app ad’s advertised product to myself because I wanted to look at it in more detail tomorrow.
I wasn’t looking for the product it was advertising, but I see how it could be extremely useful for me if it works.
Unless you do this with the majority of the ads you see, and you believe this is a common experience for most people?
However, I think advertising in itself isn't inherently evil. If a chess website served non-tracking, static (no-JS) banner ads about relevant products (maybe, specifically, chess products?) to offset costs, I don't see anything wrong with it. Of course the question is: "what is a relevant product to advertise next to chess?" Would... other board game advertisements be acceptable?
> to promote and encourage the teaching and practice of the game of chess and its variants".
So no, an advertorial for a book does not do anything for me.
It's good to know the rules, but you shouldn't live your life by them.
It means a sign saying "no blue cars" is the exception proving the rule that non-blue cars are allowed.
Mozilla spends 10s of millions every year on “advertising and promotion” per their financial statements, though they have other things to advertise about than just Firefox.
I wish more sites would do ads without using ad networks. Communities like the chess world are small enough that all the providers know each other and could probably work together in a way that benefits everyone, including users.
Really? I'd love to hear more about this.
> There are even some companies with no advertisement spending because their product is so essentially useful that people will seek it out themselves.
and that's in response to someone suggesting low profile/almost-no-ads. I completely agree about the low-profile/almost-no-ad approach (in the tech world having a community that evangalises for you is an advertisers wet dream, for example!), and I think that's what a lot of people in this thread are calling for. On a chess website, have ads for chess books/chess boards/novice-to-grandmaster streams, that sort of stuff, rather than shoving an ad for an Amazon mattress at the bottom of a blog post on Continuous Integration!
I'm writing in a paper notepad right now, found a web shop selling it by a normal Google result after describing what I was looking for, not an ad.
The pens I always buy I first bought in a stationary store, ended up liking them and now I always buy that brand.
Farmers sell their produce to supermarkets probably without having to advertize for them, and I go to the particularly supermarket I go to because it's closest to where I live.
Lots of things we use on a daily basis we never saw ads for, and yet they're sold to us by companies. Somehow.
hacker news is heavily affiliated with ycombinator - and I can almost guarantee that I've seen ads/puff pieces for ycombinator over the last decade.
> The pens I always buy I first bought in a stationary store, ended up liking them and now I always buy that brand.
Just because you purchased a product without seeing an ad for it doesn't mean that that company doesn't have an ad spend. How did they get to that stationery store in the first place?
> Farmers sell their produce to supermarkets probably without having to advertize for them
Farmers likely work with a coop style organisation (who _do_ advertise heavily), or maybe have some local link. That local link is generated by having a presence in local business forums, farmers markets, local stores. Back in the day, your local butcher or greengrocer would take out full page ad in your town's newspaper to show the special offers they have on this week, nowadays I get facebook ads for my butcher.
> Lots of things we use on a daily basis we never saw ads for, and yet they're sold to us by companies. Somehow.
That's a strawman; the original claim was that there are companies with no advertising, not that people buy products without seeing advertising for them.
_That said_, their "Discover" range of videos on youtube sure look like ads (albeit not banner ads). I know that Tesla have had a presence at a bunch of EV events here in Scotland; they have a stall and cars there that you can test drive. It's definitely not banner-ad-on-google, (and the publicity from stating they don't do ads is likely an ad in itself), but it's definitely "paid marketing"
Super interesting though, thank you for giving me a rabbit hole to go down!
Why more? If donations are enough why ads?
"Advertising is the way we grant power to the machine" - said Samuel Butler in Erewhon (1872).
I'm thinking a lot about the nature of advertising. I guess, after all, it sells excess, stuff which shouldn't exist. It propels low quality, overproduction, unlimited and unnecessary growth. The pain-points of this current era.
Just take a look at our / tech / programming sector. We are well done without ads. I've never seen a Clojure or a CSS ad in my life, nor Atom, nor Linux. Nor Gmail, nor TakeShape, nor Vercel and the list is endless. Yet still using them and happy with them. And they are happy with me.
No ads work. In change, this market requires educated participants, not just blind consumers.
Advertising is not inherently evil.
When it becomes evil is when it intentionally tries to deceive us, capture and processe insane amounts of information about us, and influence the display of information for its own ends. If I did that to my wife, it wouldn't be OK.
If your single purpose in life was to play board games with your wife, you would probably also observe these tendencies in your questions.
The same can be said about any negotiation or even any interaction, can't it? Yet there are some people and some companies you like and some that you don't like.
I've been a customer liaison at a place where the customer actively went out of their way to see our sales guy; yes, it cost them money but he'd get them a better deal the they could on their own or with any other vendor they knew. He'd actively reduce his sale if possible without even mentioning but the customer had been with us for years and had noticed the pattern.
There's no reason why ads aren't a spectrum as well:
I see nothing wrong with a link to "this is the gear that I use" on a clearly marked page as long as they actually use it.
Or a couple of books. ("You must read these 30 books to be a successful <x>" is of course another thing entirely.)
No single snowflake is responsible for the avalanche. Even if a single ad is not inherently evil, in aggregate they have become a problem.
1. Not all snowflakes become avalanches.
2. If we didn't have snowflakes, we wouldn't have snow, and that would cause huge problems as well.
Evil isn't an objective measure. However ads want to get some attention away from the content I care about to the ad.
One can argue that the "classic" Google ad, where I search for a pan and Google showing me ads for shops selling pans serves my request, at the same time I can argue that I was looking for a somewhat objective (while that's a lie - the algorithm showing search results has some biases) listing, while I get the one paying most.
In my judgment the ad is bad, but the attention it drags is my payment for the information.
What resulted is that they turned off ads altogether[2]. I haven’t seen them post about a retrospective, but since they’ve never looked back. It seems like turning off ads was a good decision for both the users of OGS and the platform as a whole.
1: https://forums.online-go.com/t/speeding-up-ogs-around-the-wo...
When I go to a website, I decide to direct my attention to this website, because I believe it will offer something of interest to me.
Obviously things don't come for free, somebody has to pay for it, but the issue is that as a user, I didn't agree to getting my attention diverted. The trade isn't done upfront and by the time I see the ad, it's already too late.
There is also a collective argument to me made about humanity browsing like headless chickens and not being able to focus on important things because of all these distractions.
In a way, you are the one coming to PLATFORM (site, newspaper, TV program), so don't come back maybe, but don't tell PLATFORM whether they can out a distracting vase at the entrance, or ads on the sidebar, or a distracting ticker at the bottom of the screen.
Just because it's not on screen the entire time doesn't mean it isn't a distraction. TV ad breaks are one of the best methods for producers - guaranteed impressions, broad audiences, official metrics, etc. - whilst also being the worst for consumers. An hour of my time set aside for watching something I enjoy now contains 20 minutes of content I don't care about at all, and cannot skip/bypass if not interested, and the 40 minutes of content is closer to 30 because of repeated content either side of ad breaks.
“We’ll be back in...<skip, skip, skip, skip>...and we’re back.”
For free to air TV I only watch, and it's very occasionally these days, shows that I have recorded to PVR where I skip all the adverts.
I avoid sites with pop-overs for newsletters or animated averts whenever possible.
They're not a "distracting vase at the entrance" they're a "crass man who steps into your path whilst screaming in your face".
I don't know what business models such sites should adopt but I do know that things that invasively take control from me or try to break my concentration, if only for a moment, are things I find deeply unpleasant.
That might say more about me than the advertising industry but there you go.
I'm grateful for sites like lichess and the stance they are taking. It's lovely and quite.
Let me do some advertising right now. Daniel Naroditsky's twitch stream is amazing. Go watch 'em https://www.twitch.tv/gmnaroditsky
(If you're into chess, you almost certainly already know about him.)
He also gets into feuds with Hikaru and won't shut up about him for some reason nowadays, and is constantly on a soapbox, but whatever. The chess is fun to watch.
Now, if you saw a banner ad for that on lichess, would you really feel awful about it? I mean, that's a fine perspective, but I'm of the opinion of "just shovel all the content in front of me and let me pick out what I like." It works wonderfully on YouTube's recommendation algorithm.
But of course, your feelings are justified for modern ads as currently implemented. Mobile games are just a complete horror fest now. (It was delightful to discover Cardinal Quest 2, since every aspect of the game can be played without paying a cent or seeing an ad. It's more or less "chess, but with monsters.")
Frankly, yes. Lichess is such a relief because I know it's a place I can go without someone trying to sell me something.
I did, but if at some point they will have to add some ad, I won't consider that awful if done in the right way.
Why? Plenty of sites are able to survive solely on a donation model, even large ones. Look at Wikipedia.
Modest ads wouldn't be a problem if I hadn't seen so many major sites follow a slippery slope from that to obnoxious ads and heavy tracking.
After all, ad money $ will show up instantly and measurably in an A/B test or project outcome, while turned-off users, lost trust, garish design and poor performance have much subtler, harder to measure impacts.
And before you know it you're a newspaper website with 20 tracking scripts, or youtube with ads layered on ads layered on ads.
Naroditsky isn't paying you to promote his stream, so it doesn't qualify as an ad as ads are being referred to in lichess's post
That may well be true, but let me tell you a story.
I recently got into binge watching some old TV shows I enjoyed as a kid, like What's My Line and a few others. But most of the YouTube copies have the commercials stripped out!
The few videos that have the old commercials are a blast. The Remington Rand Univac Electronic Brain. The Remington Rand Shaver! And as we all know, 9 out of 10 doctors recommend Camels.
Flintstones fan? How about Fred and Barney sneaking out back to smoke some Winstons while Wilma and Betty mow the lawn.
I wonder which of today's web ads will achieve the cultural significance of these old classics?
The fondness that I associate with those ads are because they are a window to a world that was simpler and in someways beautiful. Do I miss those times? Somewhat. Do I want those days back? Probably not, because for me (and my generation) the progress has been stupendous.
Our house was one of the first built in the neighborhood. The house being built next door after we moved in had one feature we didn't have: a bomb shelter!
So we made that our neighborhood clubhouse. It was a place where all the kids could hang out. We brought cookies and snacks and prepared for survival.
And when nothing bad ended up happening, and the new owners moved in and kicked us out, we were just happy that the world hadn't ended!
Thanks to HN for connecting people across time and space and enabling exchange of memorable experiences.
But you have to admit that the Remington Rand Univac Electronic Brain predicting the weather was pretty cool, yes?
Still doesn't mean I'm not installing and updating my adblocker!
He discovered later he was only manipulated into that, but still classified this as good memories.
It's a little bit like those old adverts, it doesn't mean it is a good thing to perpetuate.
This is very unlikely. Back in the day ads were a form of content in themselves. They had to be memorable to be effective, since your TV did not have a "click here" button. Web ads are more comparable to junk flyers, and I doubt you remember any of those.
Some of the other ads were great. A live report from the computer room where the Remington Rand Univac Electronic Brain was predicting the weather? Awesome! And a big step on the way to today where I can use Weather Underground forecasts and talk to you over radio and light waves on our personal supercomputers.
Even using your method, the website will transmit information about me to several ad networks without my consent about retargeting, about which sites I'm visiting, which sites I visited before (via referrer header) and will fingerprint me. Even with their (mostly non-compliant) GDPR cookie banners, information is still transmitted.
As far as I'm concerned, no website owner has ever given me a choice of "just using the back button".
Only ad-blocking is enough to stop this from happening.
This will become more funny with We assembly. There review isnahrder and even if it is free software it will be ages to verify the code the server delivers matches the source.
There is a fundamental control issue where a license debate is irrelevant detour. (For me this is the biggest flaw in the FSF - they haven't grasped that yet, while smart ideas would be needed)
The question is whether it is auditable and improvable. This is what free software is for.
That's why the FSF takes a stand against what it calls "software as a service substitute". Technically, they are correct, for the reason stated above. An Internet that is pure protocol, with clients for remote services being local apps, is not difficult to imagine; in fact, that's how it started and that's how it still works.
What's different is the friction of running an embedded blob from a webpage is negligible compared to installing a package on your OS, therefore the "distribution" phase of the software lifecycle is effectively factored out, making the opportunity for user choice minimal. (Unless you run NoScript or LibreJS by default, which I support.)
Economically, SaaS is the path of least resistance. You deliver your product through the same platform that people use to browse cat pics, and it works invisibly enough that users never question whether it's doing the right thing. This creates ample opportunity for externalities to be dumped onto the end user, as we observe with the nascent privacy crisis.
Perhaps such an externality is of a sufficiently complex or speculative nature that users may not be able to identify it, or willing to care. But that doesn't mean it's ruled out; at least in theory, integrating with the existing legal system by way of distributing your code under a Libre license seems like a good way to nip possible shenanigans in the bud. (As far as your code is concerned, of course - as opposed to everyone else's non-free code out there.)
Of course, everyone is free to do what they think best, but it's good to have the FSF's radical evangelism as a point of reference - it's quite possible to do meaningful computing in this way, although maybe not as part of an organization that ignores the ethical underpinnings of its methods! (And that's what computers do best nowadays: algowashing.)
Sadly, I find the FSF's approach to the Web somewhat misplaced - for software that is neither locally deployed, nor accessed as an opaque service, but remotely delivered on-demand, focus should be on the delivery chain being auditable, and source maps being available, in the case of WASM and minified JS.
Instead, we get LibreJS, which is, as far as I can see, a license-based whitelist - regardless of the fact that non-minified JS is open-source by definition and never compiled to a binary form. The GPL doesn't make a whole lot of sense for embedded scripts, powerful as they are. It would be more relevant for WebAssembly, that's for sure.
FSF could benefit from catchier nomenclature, even the "free as in blah blah" is too complex for the knee-jerk thinking cultivated in consumers; why couldn't they have called it "freedomware" or some such, I can't help but wonder; it was born in the same epoch as "shareware", "freeware", etc.
"Libre" is cute but causes associations with communism in the American public - same core userbase that is happy with shooting people in the name of "freedom", and would be proud to promote "freedomware", unlike today.
I see this more as you technically having the ability to do this, but what makes it your “right”?
That doesn't mean I have the right to use a website that decides they aren't good with me doing so without the ads or other portions I may block.
I don't believe I have any moral obligation to make that choice myself. Simply put, I have the right to block ads, and the website has the right to block usage to me if I don't load said ads, trackers, etc.
Let’s assume I agree that you have been tricked into following a link that is infested with terrible ads and that I agree you have the right to block those ads.
Isn’t it then your obligation to never visit that site again?
You understand that ads are how the website has chosen to make money. You don’t like how they have chosen to make money so you simply never visit the website again, right?
It’s like if you found out a restaurant didn’t accept cash and still kept going to eat there when you only had a credit card, knowing in advance you can’t and won’t pay.
Not really. As long as your site is public, I can enter. If you don't want that, make it private, or subscription only.
> It’s like if you found out a restaurant didn’t accept cash and still kept going to eat there when you only had a credit card, knowing in advance you can’t and won’t pay.
It's more like going to a public museum that accepts donations and not making a donation. The place is public, and I decide if I pay or not.
As a publicly available resource, it is like browsing. I can browse many brick and mortar stores without exchanging anything of value. And like a store, if a website decided they did not want people browsing without a purchase, they could block access.
Auto play videos in a modal that can't be closed that start with a video on. Wtf
I think I hate this more than ads, honestly (not all autoplaying videos are ads).
On a normal day advertising is pretty useless. When the world is changing it is a very effective way to find that out. It is part of the system that drives rapid improvement.
The fact is that human biological impulse does not line up with rational objectives. People wouldn't need to be subjected to ads if it was desirable - they'd ask for them, much like those "shopping channels" you can choose to watch.
> People wouldn't need to be subjected to ads if it was desirable
Substantial value from ads is they communicate (1) what people didn't yet know existed and (2) what everyone else knows (because they saw the ad too).
Ads work by and large because people want the products that the ads are selling. A lot of ads are stupid and I'd personally rather not see them - but if I think that, they also probably aren't targeted at me.
evolutionary objectives are not rational. Nor are they particularly up-to-date, especially sugar cravings. Addictions, vices and impulses of many kinds are not at all rational, and it is a virtue to have the willpower to resist them.
> (1) what people didn't yet know existed
This is far from the only objective, and the substance of many ads demonstrates this: why do brands like coca-cola pay top-dollar for superbowl ad time? You would think they are well known enough..
> (2) what everyone else knows
Ads are not knowledge, it is common cultural reference for the purpose of advertisement. I don't see the value in this if you are not an advertiser.
> Ads work by and large because people want the products that the ads are selling
If we follow the same logic, no one would object to ad blockers, b/c the people who want to see ads wouldn't use them.
I clicked the link because the title caught my attention. I come to this website because it has a rotation of good content, all of which is more likely than not to catch and hold my attention, keeping it from something else.
I also don't generally agree that all ads are bad, which may put me in the minority
The author said they "decide to direct my attention to this website" and used "attack" because they "didn't agree to getting my attention diverted."
The useful distinction is between the content you came to the website to direct your attention toward, and things that tear your attention away.
We can even go one step further and say there can't be an ad attacking your attention when the page itself doesn't exist at all.
The bulk of the internet wouldn't exist if not for ads. Things like youtube almost certainly could not exist, with how expensive it is to store data, provide bandwidth, develop the site itself. It's only thanks to ads that the internet is where it is today.
The fact that ads got us here doesn't mean that we should uncritically accept that business model going forward.
Now, the problem is there's no way to know if it was motivated at all (nor to what extent) by the promise of a referral fee. So it could be noise and not a genuine referral based on intrinsic qualities of the product.
I've advertised things on my blog, using referral codes, because that helps me defray hosting charges (I've largely stopped as the income is far too low in recent years; I've also mostly moved my content to third party sites with open licenses) but they've always been genuine either comparative reviews (which I was doing to help me decide what to get) or recommendations based on something I use. I'm putting that link there anyway, the company might as well pay me if anyone follows it.
"For example I used to use Digital Ocean to spin up a Minecraft server for occasional use, recently I've been using Vultr for the same - it seems substantially cheaper, and there was a good deal on for a free month."
Suppose that true comment had referral links, would it really be intrinsically worse?
He said after celebrating 10 years posting on a site that’s an ad for a VC fund...
I take the complete opposite position: if I take the effort to make a website, I'll do what I want with it. Maybe I consider your visit an attack on my bandwidth, and I compensate with ads. If you don't like it, you're free to not visit it. Unless I told you in advance that you're not going to see ads, there's no basis for assuming that there won't be ads just like there's no basis for assuming you won't see NSFW content on a random website, religious content, political content, etc
Says who? Arguing against ads isn't arguing against compensation. You're assuming what is being assumed.
> When I go to a website, I decide to direct my attention to this website, because I believe it will offer something of interest to me.
You are specifically talking about compensation, which that quote does not.
And the counterpoint that "but they might not have known about x product in the first place" is useless. Because if they wanted/needed something like x they would have just googled "something that can do x" and found x.com or whatever to discover it. To reiterate, the fact that they weren't looking for it in the first place means that they didn't want it.
See also this[0] guy that did extensive tests and found that "tasteful and responsible" banner ads pissed people off enough to negatively affect traffic to his website.
IF they need money they can open up a fundraiser or donation channel.
Want to put this to a test? Imagine if you were to create a competitor and you also wanted to run ads, now imagine you will be competing with an extremely successful project that people love that doesn’t run ads so you will never be able to offer a better experience to their users.
Lichess is unbeatable.
It's good that both exist. I spend 99% of my online chess playing time on Lichess but there are also lots of people for who it is the other way around.
The point is that creating a new chess site today would require to be better than lichess. If we look where Magnus Carlsen investment goes, they are all paid services (Play Magnus/chess24/chessable). He doesn't event try to compete with chess.com/lichess.
I find it quiet strange, that we are living in a world where ads are so ubiquitous that a site is explaining why they don’t have ads, rather than webpages that use ads explain why they do.
Also from a user's perspective, I would undoubtedly choose the one without ads of the two alternatives if they were competing.
> There is absolutely nothing positive about advertisements on websites from the perspective of their users.
From your response:
> I think that is a legit way to get a little income without burdening my users.
The former puts users first; the latter puts them last. There’s a chasm between “what do they want” and “what will they bear”.
Maybe it's the Facebooks/Googles of the world who are responsible for creating a generation of developers that see ads as the only feasible business model?
If you have an ad-supported service, and you remove ads for a day, *100%* of your users will love you for it. That should tell you something!
Anything else means you're selling your reader's attention to the highest bidder. You're deliberately adding noise to your website and reducing its usability. Also it immediately introduces conflict of intetest: you're associated with the company you're advertising so any positive opinions you might have about their products ought to be taken with several grains of salt.
So is someone calls an ambulance and they provide you a service without you being conscious, you are liable to pay? What on Earth?
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
By the way, HN users were about 50% in the US, last time I checked.
Would you please not post low-quality disses like this? They break the site guidelines, like this one:
"Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community." (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)
- and they lead to extremely low-quality discussion, as seen below.
It's not good to undervalue work because you really rely on the gift of the worker to keep the project going.
Their UI also feels clunky and dated: kind of like a 90s, or early 2000s desktop app.
They do offer much more features, but most of them aren't even remotely essential to me: like a bazillion of bizarre chess variants (lichess has a few simple alternatives, but no stuff like 4-player chess etc.), or "personalized" bots to play against ("play against Beth Harmon"; it feels very Disneylandish to me), and so on.
This being said, I don't mean to bash chess.com, it has certain advantages, and I do play on both websites. Still, lichess is my go-to, no-nonsense, default option.
Nothing in the news nor the interface mentioned chess.
Ok, but I'm not buying the website, just using it.
> Imagine if scientists kept the result of every scientific study to themselves. The same work would have to be done over and over again as everyone was forced to reinvent the wheel countless times to do anything at all.
Computer scientists do exactly this, as it's possible to publish while withholding your source-code. This is harmful not only in that effort is wasted reimplementing published algorithms, but also in that the reader is deprived of the ability to check the source-code for bugs that might impact the published results.
This topic has cropped up before: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24261706
Just a couple of examples (for which I'd be actually willing to pay for)
1. Stockfish, server-side game analysis, learning from mistakes 2. Deep individual analysis based on XY games, practicing on weak spots, openings etc. with stockfish 3. Their practice library
Again, all of these are super valuable to those who want to take their game to the next level, don't see why anyone in that segment wouldn't pay for this. The "entertainment" feature of lichess which is the chess itself should be free indeed.
I'm not sure what you mean by 2 and 3, but lichess already has server side analysis.
If it's just that you'd like to pay for it, you can set up donations. You can also contribute your own server to the analysis cluster.
Lichess is a really inspiring project on how a free/open source software community can provide the same value based features that we normally assume can only be done by monetization.
I think that's the first time I've seen "beautiful" and "monetisation" in the same phrase.
Just because damn-near every other website on the internet is comprised entirely of gradients and parallax scrolling doesn't mean any that doesn't is "ugly".
Newspaper websites are full of advertisement and probably the worst sites in terms of UX in the internet. Even if you hide the ads, there's still the constant clickbait and autoplaying videos. Same for paid-by-ad blogs that just use default themes (with notable exceptions like Daring Fireball). Same for any file hosts that doesn't have a freemium model (compare, for example, Mediafire vs Dropbox).
On the other hand, services that offer recurring signatures mostly often have better UX.