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Comment by ChicagoBoy11 | Hacker News Reader

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

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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.

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.

Extremely good point, I don't really game outside of online chess so I can't say that I have a very wide sample pool. TBH the chat I used to see when my brother was playing League blew any chess experience I've had out of the water. I'd almost use a word beyond "salty" for that

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.

Me too, but it's still much better on lichess than chess.com in my experience. Also, cheating is not as bad on lichess

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.

I've never ever looked at the chat. And knowing that it costs money, and quite a lot, to moderate that, I'll never report anyone. It's just vanity. I don't care what you write to me. I just beat you in the game. Just cry it out. There you go.

I report these people in the hope that other players don't have to experience their hateful comments.

There is all kinds of player bad behavior that needs to be manually verified - cheating is the obvious one, but there's also smurfing, excessive sandbagging, clock abuse (e.g. letting your clock tick down to zero in a loss, just to be annoying).

What's smurfing and sandbagging?

EDIT: I ask because I was once accused of smurfing (I'm only a casual player) in the chat during the endgame.

Smurfing is when you disguise yourself as a noob on an alternate account when you are really more skilled.

Sandbagging is related: deliberately losing to play people with lower ratings.

I might be wrong, but I think it's considered moderation (at least some of) the anti-cheating controls in place.

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