It would have been nicer if you were building the "lichess.org" of speed cubing
And I'm not the GP, but I agree. To expand my thoughts:
- The free version is vastly inferior to lichess.org, and it nags you to upgrade at every opportunity.
- They are anti-competitive to the point of censoring the mention of lichess on their forums (for e.g. feature requests) [1]
- I guess it's subjective how paid chess.com compares to lichess.org but I much prefer lichess.
- Minor UX/UI annoyances (you can't give your opponent time or allow takeback requests in a rated game, etc.)
- The price of diamond membership is quite steep for a chess website, but I guess compared to lichess.org anything is quite steep.
Thinking about it further, I guess chess.com seems extra bad because of the existence of lichess.org which is just amazing (100% open source including the apps, zero ads, open API, can download the database of all games, etc.)
Full disclosure, I'm a diamond chess.com member (signed up in January for a year) because I'm quite a chess enthusiast and really wanted to see if it was worth it. It's not, in my opinion.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/chess/comments/qudyuq/why_streams_w...
I've played online since back in the days of ICC which was a defacto monopoly given how much larger than it was than all other sites. You can see their records here [1]. Their record for the max number of players logged in was 7,352. Chess.com at a really random time right now has 183,538 people playing.
It wasn't long ago that all of the big tournaments were gradually dying off - even Linares died, for lack of funding. And then the rise of chess.com (along with Magnus - who is an absolutely amazing world champ in terms not only of play but also 'ambassadorship for the game') just sent the game in an entirely different trajectory that nobody would have imagined just 10 or 15 years ago.
Yes, it's great that this game is finally getting popular. About time an up and comer took the crown away from Settlers.
The money nagging is annoying, especially considering they're charging for basically just stockfish wasm running on your machine.
I stopped using chess.com because I found it way more addicting compared to lichess and I was way too invested in my chess.com rating.
Lichess also uses zero-time premoves and chess.com uses .1 second premoves. I think these also contribute to lichess feeling snappier.
Having played competitively, zero-time premoves make no sense and they should cost.
Lichess is great if enjoy the flagging meta, and not so great if you don't. It's made even more extreme by their interpretation of sufficient mating material. A single knight is generally counted as sufficient mating material so you end up scenarios where you're forced to play N v N along with 0 second premoves and that's not something I much enjoy.
I understand some folks like this sort of stuff, which is why it's great that there are multiple sites competing instead of a single site monopoly.