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.
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.
Auto play videos in a modal that can't be closed that start with a video on. Wtf
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
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.")
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.
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.
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
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?
He said after celebrating 10 years posting on a site that’s an ad for a VC fund...
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.
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.
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...
> 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!
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?
Really? I'd love to hear more about this.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Also from a user's perspective, I would undoubtedly choose the one without ads of the two alternatives if they were competing.
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.
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.
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.)
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 :)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
$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.
(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.
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.
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_...
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.
* 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.
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?
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!
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 :)
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?
Maybe add more of a header section to explain the game or have a picture of what it looks like in a game?
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.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
By the way, HN users were about 50% in the US, last time I checked.
So is someone calls an ambulance and they provide you a service without you being conscious, you are liable to pay? What on Earth?
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.
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.
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.
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.
Is it usual for French organisations to apply English law?
Carlsen, on Lichess, against other GMs and FMs.
* 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 :)-
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.
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
It’s also a great example of something born of and sustained by a community: a testament to the chess demography.
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?
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.
Edit: Just played a game, my ID was still active and my last game was in 2012!
That's really just something we tell ourselves to feel better about serving ads. It doesn't actually match reality.
> 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.
> 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.
(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
Lichess is responsible for most of my chess progress through matches, puzzles, analysis board. Excellent piece of software.
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.
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.
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.
Lichess has been live for over a decade, they are a proven success.
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.
- lidraughts.org
- lishogi.org
Nothing in the news nor the interface mentioned chess.
Ok, but I'm not buying the website, just using it.
