Lichess is such an inspiring demonstration of what talented enthusiasts can build, even when driven not by profit but by simple passion. You can feel the craftsmanship and the love of chess in the app and in the speed of iteration. We could use more of this in the world.
> It amounts to $170 per month. Great news: I have a job (at prismic.io) and I can completely afford that. Lichess is my hobby, and all hobbies cost a bit of money. I can tell you that the joy of building lichess is absolutely worth the price I pay for it!
Maybe it’s because I spend some number of hours a week looking at trees, but it never ceases to amaze me how stupid the average technical person is around the word “forever”. If you don’t have a trust set up to pay the hosting costs in perpetuity, you’re one recession or bad illness away from it being ad-supported. Or Microsoft could make you an offer you can’t refuse like they did with Minecraft.
There are plenty of legal and financial constructs meant to approximate a forever status, and I don’t see any evidence that anyone has tried to achieve any of them.
When are we going to call “making promises you cannot keep” what it really is? Lying.
It’ll be interesting watching it play out over the next five or ten years.
We can’t be far from having a critical mass of people who realize all the stuff they’ve been eye-rolling at or downvoting is actually true, and then acting like they discovered something new. Half the time I’m just parroting people older than me. More field correspondent than discoverer.
There's a big difference for good intentions that failed vs lying. I think you know that too. For $170 a month, it could easily switch to a patreon or other type of user contribution model. For $170 a month, it could be get a paper route to pay for it.
> There's a big difference for good intentions that failed vs lying.
That's true. Good intentions are more compelling, so they draw more people in and convince them more thoroughly, then cause more suffering in the end when everything falls apart.
The first principle is that you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool.
- Feynman
Lying to yourself doesn’t socially have the same moral hazard as intentionally misleading someone, but the outcomes are often indistinguishable from the perspective of the affected parties.
All the guy is saying that $170 isn't a big amount for him, he is gainfully employed and doesn't expect to be short of funds to the extent that he can't afford to run the site. There is no need to bring "lying" into this.
> If you don’t have a trust set up to pay the hosting costs in perpetuity, you’re one recession or bad illness away from it being ad-supported.
You didn't mention that if the trustees commit a fraud, you are one bad trust away from it being ad-supported. Are you lying? What, you don't have anyway of knowing that it could happen and there are so many other things that can go wrong? Exactly.
Depends a bit on your location also. In some countries, the social security is good enough that people can survive on them while doing whatever (low cost) hobbies they like. I've heard of a few academics continuing to do research while being supported by the unemployment money.
But yeah, some big company offering a crapload of money to buy lichess is also a problem. No-one is idealistic enough to refuse an amount of money that can support them and their family for the next two generations.
I should point out that I’m not just random internet grouch #435, but someone dabbling with this class of problem.
I’m trying right now to set something up that has the potential to have much more value to someone greedy than it does to my target audience. It’ll take a while I think before it really comes to that, but it is not out of the realm of reason.
I will most definitely be trying to take the temptation away from myself (or my heirs) to sell it. I would likely do that anyway, but the goad is that it costs more than I can really afford to write off unless I get very lucky, or others contribute substantially. There really isn’t much incentive for them to do that while I own everything outright. If I don’t want to end up with a cat food diet in my 80’s I’m probably going to need some of my investment back.
> Maybe it’s because I spend some number of hours a week looking at trees, but it never ceases to amaze me how stupid the average technical person is around the word “forever”.
If you truly want to be pedantic, the word "forever" does not appear in the post at all.
Less pedantically, I believe most people have the ability to understand that nothing lasts forever. From reading the post, the emphasis was on "free" and not on the longevity. Also the title of the post could easily be interpreted to mean "Why Lichess will be free for as long as it exists".
What’s the difference between “always” and “forever”? Do you think that’s a valid sticking point for people? I’m willing to rephrase as I don’t see a distinction that matters to any of my points.
> “Why Lichess will be free as long as it exists.”
Same problem. It’s built entirely on wishful thinking. Do you agree with all the choices you made when you were twenty? Do you agree with all of the choices you made after the first time you remember disagreeing with 20 year old you? What makes you think you aren’t going to disagree with half of what you think now?
Current you is going to have to win arguments with future you if you insist on any sort of concept or permanence. Especially since 75 year old you is going to think the concept of permanence is bullshit. If you’re not going to take any steps in that regard, or even plan to make them in the future, then you really don’t understand human nature very well, and probably not yourself either. That alone is worth some hours of quiet contemplation.
> In some contexts they mean the same, but differ syntactically [...] In other contexts there's a difference in that always usually means continuously, at all [relevant] times, whereas forever usually means for an infinite amount of time into the future.
See the link for examples that might further clarify it for you. Obviously stackexchange is not a definitive answer space, but you can verify the differences from the linked post by looking the words up in a detailed dictionary, like the OED.
Worse, if the original author could not keep the site up some asshole would take the code base, start glichess.org and slowly take the credit for it all.
Of course lofty principles would be cited, like "this is how open source works" or "you should not have used that license if you hadn't wanted this to happen".
And many people here would defend the asshole and forget the original author.
Lichess is a non-profit association in France. Microsoft can't just buy it. If they have no money no more, they'll launch a donation campaign and if it doesn't work, they'll just put the site down until they have enough, then it can remain free forever. If the association ever breaks down, the code is out there for anyone to "reprendre le flambeau" .
Thanks to them, being able to play chess online is a common good. They're not profit driven, they're freedom driven.
I don’t see any reference to this in the about pages. For this conversation in particular that seems like an important oversight if true. American nonprofits tend to list that stuff prominently. Maybe too prominently, but that’s a whole other kettle of fish.
English is not my native language, I don't quite master all the subtleties.
From what I understood you hijacked the thread into something like "don't be gullible, nothing runs forever, they're lying" which misrepresented the point of the Lichess article which is that they won't charge ever.
Imagine sb reacting to an announcement that healthcare will be free with "Nobody lives for ever, don't be stupid, they're lying"
Hijacking threads towards your personal point of interest is fine I guess and is part of why HN is interesting to me but then it should be clear you are talking about your own thing and you should not artificially place it in the context of the post under discussion (especially if it turns out you have not read it through).
I’m sorry a free website is blowing smoke up my ass about future plans. I’ve been hearing this same promise for longer than many Hackernews reader have been alive. It does not get easier to hear it with each retelling.
There are more than two states available here. An excellent time to announce always free is when you set up the trust. An excellent time to announce the intention to be free is when asking for advice or help with making that happen.
Edit to add: think about it this way. When a prospective love interest makes an oddly specific promise, does that make you feel more or less safe than you did before? “I’d never cheat on you with your brother.” “I’d never murder you and bury your body in Texas.” Well this was a lovely date, I’ll call you. But I have a busy week and a business trip so it might be a little bit.
I was already assuming lichess intended to remain free. Why are you telling me that now? Was that in jeopardy? Do we need to have a talk?
Entirely possible. I mentioned somewhere else in all of this grey text that I’ve been hearing this exact story for 25 years now and it doesn’t seem to get any easier to hear it from a new mouth.
Everybody says they’re going to do their new favorite thing forever and everybody either gets distracted, gets a new new favorite thing, or worst, gets shit on by life and has to backpedal. Just... Roll that good energy into literally anything else. Please.
They didn’t blackmail anybody, they bought it for $2.5 billion with a B. That is a titanically difficult number to turn down. It’s so much money that you can avoid having to look at people you told your former plans to.
I think in general it was much harder and more surprising for Susan G Komen to become what it has than for YouTube to become what it has.
You can set up a non-profit, making it easier to accept money and adding friction to commercial entities trying to buy you out. Of course then have to chase operating expenses forever. You do well enough, you can set up a trust or endowments to operate in part off of investment profits, and now you don’t have to worry about one big donor trying to name everything after himself or twisting the mandate to their worldview.
Humans can screw anything up given enough time, but if your idea is good enough for copycats, then if your successors fail to keep the spirit of your goals alive, one of the imitators most likely will.
lichess is by far the finest piece of complex online software I’ve ever used. Desktop or mobile it works perfectly. There is no Silicon Valley, Spartan hiring processes, elite University filters: just open source contribution and a great quality gate.
It’s also a great example of something born of and sustained by a community: a testament to the chess demography.
yes, I believe it was at a hackathon in 2010/2011 when during an off-topic discussion with Thibault he mentioned moving to Scala. So very long time ago :)
> There is absolutely nothing positive about advertisements on websites from the perspective of their users. They eat up valuable screen space and bandwidth for something that nobody wants to see. They often manipulate and misinform. They have even been the source of security vulnerabilities many times in the past.
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.
While its good that you're willing to compromise in a reasonable manner, I don't think it has particular relevance to the point that advertisements in any form are most likely to be about something you won't go looking for yourself. There are even some companies with no advertisement spending because their product is so essentially useful that people will seek it out themselves.
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.
Some advertisements are malicious attacks on your attention to build brand recognition and entice you to buy things you don't need.
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?
And in the case of chess books, an advertorial is quite different from a good review. I very much enjoy reading a good review on a chess book, with all the good things and bad things. With an advertorial the language is quite different and it is very hard to get informed well about what you really get when you buy the book. With honest critique, I very much enjoy reading about the bad parts, and if they are not bad for me, or just a nuance, it might be a really good book for me. Only an honest review can give me that.
So no, an advertorial for a book does not do anything for me.
That's exactly how Google ads worked in the very beginning. Text only, all in one place, it was great! If we could somehow return that type of ads, I'd consider disabling adblocker.
I could have sworn I’ve seen ads for Firefox. I know I’ve seen ads in Firefox, some placed by Mozilla, but I could have sworn I’ve seen ads for Firefox not in Firefox. (This is nearly impossible to Google for due to all the hits for ad-blockers.)
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 could see an argument that ads for specific, chess-related products like Chessable courses would be welcome on Lichess, perhaps even as an opt-in so users can choose to support the site. I know Chessable is constantly introducing new courses and I don't always remember to check regularly. A banner that tells me of a new course I'm interested in would solve that. For me, at least, but I doubt I'm the only one.
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.
I am not sure, what parent thought and I don't have examples without any spending to advertisement, but there is very "low profile", almost no ads categories.
1) Big business-to-business manufacturers. I haven't ever seen ads for compal or asml. I am sure they are presented in trade shows and contact directly to potential customers.
2) Small data recovery shops. I know few those, one don't advertise at all, one uses only google ads (and only few keywords, not big budget).
> 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!
No-ad-spend companies are hard to come up with, some possibilities are everyday necessities with very few competitors like salt (but I think they advertise a little), or utility monopolies (I don't think my local water company or garbage collection company advertises, but I haven't checked. Maybe they advertise to the government offices that select the companies to use?). Pre-internet days, it would be easier to be sure some businesses don't advertise (neighborhood convenience stores or laundromats, for example, that get enough foot traffic to not bother advertising), but with the ease of throwing up a website nowadays (which should count as advertising), this can no longer be assumed.
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!
> If Lichess decided to promote some chess books or software on their page to supplement their donations,
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.
Almost all human interaction is in some way trying to persuade you to choose something that you might otherwise not. When I ask my wife "Shall we play a board game?" I'm in some way doing the same thing. That's not evil.
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.
Right, but the game theory there is pretty obvious: The better an ad is at "hacking" your mind and exploiting human characteristics, the more money it makes. Which naturally leads to this insane spiral of increasingly manipulative and insidious ads.
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 better an ad is at "hacking" your mind and exploiting human characteristics, the more money it makes.
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.)
>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.
No single snowflake is responsible for the avalanche. Even if a single ad is not inherently evil, in aggregate they have become a problem.
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.
i remember a few years back when online-go.com (OGS) decided to double down on ads in order to fund new servers to speed up the service outside of North America[1]. They opted to not just place ads in the landing page, but to also display ads in the game page. It was a huge disaster. Nobody liked it (including the dev who implemented it).
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.
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.
Would you say the same about free TV's ads coming mid-program? Or newspapers you actually buy that still contain ads? How would such a trade be done upfront in your opinion?
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 think the correct analogy would be that there's a corner in the screen where advertisement is playing constantly while whatever show you're watching runs.
Obviously the advertisement is going to distract you from time to time, and you won't have your full attention on the show.
Is forcibly breaking away from the content you want to watch every 10 minutes to show ads not distracting?
or the 2 minutes of repeated content from before the break to remind you what was happening before you got distracted by the ads not also distracting?
Have you ever watched a show with the ads removed and seen how much of it is actually repeated just because of ad placements?
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.
I recently cancelled a NowTV subscription because of the unskippable trailers at the start of each programme.
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.
(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.")
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.
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?
I too look back at old ads with fondness and reminisce about the simple times of late 80s and early 90s. However when I recollect how I felt at that time about those ads it's no different from today.
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.
Indeed, for me that would be the late 1950s. Times were simpler in some ways, not so much in others.
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!
That sounds to me like you're having an emotional / nostalgic response to things you were exposed to during your youth. And there is some kind of novelty to watching older commercials, no doubt. But IMO that wears of quickly. What's left is capitalistic propaganda often riddled with sexism, misogynism, homophobia etc. which to me is the real cultural significance.
Not exactly sure what changed though, wether companies discovered it's more profitable to put on an act of some kind of progressive consumerism, or if it's an actual response to an evolving society.
As propaganda ages and stops being an effective meme-weapon, the propaganda fades and the art shined through. Old, obsolete ads for dead products that you look up out of curiosity are mostly harmless.
Still doesn't mean I'm not installing and updating my adblocker!
A friend of mine, from Romania, has fond memories of his youth under the communist rule of Nicolae Ceaușescu, being always reminded how great the leader was and how he admired him as a kid.
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.
> I wonder which of today's web ads will achieve the cultural significance of these old classics?
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.
After reading the replies, I should clarify something. When I see some of those old commercials today, I too think they are appalling. Fred and Barney smoking Winstons? On a kid's show? 9 out of 10 doctors recommending Camels? Ugh. But they sure are interesting to see again.
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.
Use the back button and don't go there again. Website owners need to make a living, they have a right to try to do so the way they see best, and not all consumers share your preferences.
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.
Your browser is the entity transmitting information to ad networks, your browser is obeying instructions from the website instead of obeying your instructions.
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)
Provided a malicious host could take measures to serve the auditors a binary that matches the source, and something entirely different for everyone else, I know of no good way to confirm that a remotely served binary corresponds to the published source.
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.
FIX: it's actually "service as a software substitute", not the other way around.
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.
The "user" in this scenario would be the advertiser. While I have little sympathy for ads, and dread the emergent effects of behavioral tracking, a self-deployed ad tracker could at least be trusted by the advertiser who seeks to benefit from it, as opposed to serving the interests of its vendor first and foremost.
I also have a right to handle their HTML the way I see fit, for instance by blocking their ads. If they don't like it, they should make their website private.
Not the OP, but I have the right to control what code is delivered to (downloaded) and run on my computer.
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.
> Isn’t it then your obligation to never visit that site again?
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.
No, how a website monetizes their site is not my concern. Just because they choose ads does not obligate me to decide to not go there again. In fact, due to my technology choices, I may never even realize they have chosen that route as I may never see their ads in the first place.
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.
Those few good years after pop up ads were eliminated by pop up blockers and ad blockers was so nice. Then the war on ad block began and internet is worse then it used to be.
Auto play videos in a modal that can't be closed that start with a video on. Wtf
Firefox lets you do this without need for an addon. Stop using an ad company's browser if you don't want to see ads; there is a huge conflict of interest.
Thankfully all news websites serve their videos from a separate domain, so you only have to block that in your ad blocker. Or, just disable JavaScript and hope that won't break images because loading images with JavaScript is apparently also the hot new thing to do.
Popups and ads can still be blocked very effectively. Since I downloaded a comprehensive hosts file blacklist and filled all checkboxes in uBlock Origin's settings it's extremely rare something slips through, and if it does I can just interactively add a rule for it with a few clicks.
That is like saying the taste of good food is an attack on our reward system. Attention works that way because it is often helpful.
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 sugar and salt added to food is an attack on our reward system - but that doesn't make it good food.
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.
As a general comment - human biological impulses do generally line up with rational objectives. That is why we have them. Normally they line up with ideas that are so good it makes sense to embed them in how we live.
> 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.
When you open the window do you feel the roads, houses or buildings you see are an attack on your attention? That your own house is an attack on the attention of others? That people would rather just see the raw nature that was there before?
Absolutely. Modern architecture, coupled with politicians and developers’s greed and the lack of urban planners care, can be an attack on our intelligence, our senses and our basic human aesthetic needs. It’s not just about capturing our attention.
Everything is an "attack" on our attention. It's not a very useful distinction.
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
Even accepting that everything counts as an attack, there can't be an ad attacking your attention when it doesn't exist on the page in the first place.
>there can't be an ad attacking your attention when it doesn't exist on the page in the first place.
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.
Hmm, I'm very anti-ads; they're a scourge on society. However, a genuine report of "I read this book, you can get it here" isn't really any different attention-wise if it has a referral code.
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?
This is a pretty extreme and entitled position. You're the one assuming that the website will offer you something of interest without any reason to do so, and that you should receive it however you want (without ads). If anything it's more reasonable to assume that you'll see ads on every page you go to.
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
If they did that I'd immediately switch to something else. Nothing pisses me off more that spam. And all ads are spam. If I wanted something, I'd look for it. If you have to tell me about it first, then it's spam. Don't waste people's time/bandwidth/attention with things they didn't even want in the first place.
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.
From the outside, I like what ReadTheDocs does with Ethical Ads. Because ReadTheDocs's scope is largely limited to technical users, they can deliver "targeted marketing" where they're delivering ads based on the content of their pages rather than user tracking. Also the ads I remember seeing didn't feature attention-grabbing images, just a solid background, the advertiser's logo, and some text about what they're selling. It meshed a lot better with the page content than most ads do.
Why are you even offering a compromise when they aren't interested? There's plenty of ways for an organization like Lichess to raise funds, the ones that don't claim your attention or fuck your privacy over. Even sponsored links to e.g. chess books as mentioned elsewhere 'leak' data, they contain a referral link, linking that user's visit of the website to (e.g.) their Amazon account. Plus it would be a pittance compared to what Amazon makes off it.
IF they need money they can open up a fundraiser or donation channel.
You are missing the point. Lichess is creating a very strong competitive advantage by positioning their platform as ad free.
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.
And chess.com has more money to spend, so they can have things like paid grandmasters streaming, video courses, offical tournaments with large prizes. It's not all ad based, they also have a subscription model that opens more features.
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.
chess.com was founded in 2007. lichess started in 2010. So chess.com was already an established player.
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 believe what they are saying is that money is not the goal, the goal is the spread chess, and having ads does not contribute to that goal. That’s it.
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.
It's always so strange to see people who try to rationalize ads. They're either being dishonest about their own opinions about ads because they're guilty of serving them, or they're so far detached from reality that they genuinely don't see how much people hate ads, and just how bad they are for consumers.
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!
People go to your web development blog because they want to read about web development. They didn't go there for VPS advertisements. Make a specific page for that so that anyone who wants to know what hosting services you recommend will seek it out and visit it.
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.
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.
That's a cheap project. I have seen a single developer's salary to be more than that. Considering that around a billion games were played last year in lichess.
What I find interesting is the part at the bottom that shows how much a donation helps: a $5 donation is enough to cover the company's budget for 6 minutes. This sounds really good for a few reasons: 1) since I play Lichess for several hours a month, I feel that I'm really getting my money's worth; 2) Lichess only needs a few thousand people to contribute $5/mo to stay net positive and I feel like it's easier to convince a few thousand people in a supportive community to part ways with $5 than it is for other companies to get a million people to donate $1; 3) I remember Reddit used to show on your profile how many server minutes your Gold purchase was worth and it would display something like 200 minutes for every $5 purchase, but this is only a single server out of hundreds and doesn't account for any other expenses, so Lichess is unsurprisingly very cheap to operate in comparison.
Uh, $55k a year is not cheap! What world... Ok, it's late, I'll hold back the rest of my words. :)
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.)
Holy guacamole, I didn't scroll down far enough. Thank you for pointing this out.
"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.)
I believe he's talking about social contributions (health, retirement, unemployment), that the employer pays, and not the taxes on revenue (paid by the employee).
I feel like the developer/founder should have a higher salary. $58k a year for running a site with millions of games per day.. deserves more. Is it because they don't get enough donations? Or saving the extra money for growth/buffer?
(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 recall an AMA on Reddit, where the founder said he is perfectly fune with his salary as long as LiChess stays free and he can continue doing what he loves.
Well it seems like the founder doesn't want more money. Not everyone needs or wants "fuck you" money, and with that kind of salary you can afford a decent life in (most of) France.
Then really Lichess should have FU money. This both secures his income as long as he continues working on it, then lets him hire a replacement whenever he decides to retire.
Sure, it's up the founder of course. I think the they've created enough value to deserve that money for themselves and to use in any way they see fit though.
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
"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 would argue he already does. The entire point of "fuck you" money is that you are no longer beholden to someone else - it is not so much defined by the overall amount, but by the freedom it can buy you. He gets to work on what he loves doing every day doing it exactly the way he wants.
I’m currently trying to figure out if I wanted to work 20 hours a month post-retirement, what sort of work that would look like.
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.
You are projecting your own desires onto the founder (which is fine, but worth thinking about why they don't want the same thing as you). It seems clear that they are happy with their salary/work. For some people, more money beyond this is not a good thing.
I'm not. It's not about having more money to spend, but having enough to be permanently secure.
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.
If you’re already doing the thing you would do if you could do anything, do you still feel the need for “enough money” to walk out and go do it. I think, and some other posters seem to agree, that the answer is a qualified no.
The man describes himself as a pastafarian antifascist and lichess as a hippie communist chess server. I don't think he has the same opinion on money as you do.
"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."
>I feel like the developer/founder should have a higher salary.
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.
I'm not talking about entitlement. But this guy is really good at multiple things. SRE, frontend, backend, project management etc. He could probably earn twice as much working a normal job, and even more for the right company.
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.
> But this guy is really good at multiple things. SRE, frontend, backend, project management etc. He could probably earn twice as much working a normal job, and even more for the right company.
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.
He seems like he is truly in the upper echelons of engineering and product development ability, including soft skills as well. I’m sure he could easily make more than €70k. He might need to live in a major city though.
If you shelve the cynicism, I think the main reason you want a big pile of cash around is so when you discover that thing that makes you happy you don’t miss out on it. You don’t have to compromise.
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.
Gross avg. wage in France is $42700[1] if calculated with 12 months and no variable benefits. Mean would be more interesting, but I don't seem to easily find it.
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.
Based on StackOverflow dev survey, EU salaries are roughly 60% of what you get in the US. You'll be hard-pressed to find equivalent positions paying the same in both regions.
Are those 1:1 comparisons? I know typically in the US salaries advertised are not exactly take-home pay, but before tax amounts, and is some places in Europe salaries are advertised as take-home pay.
Well it'll never be 1:1 due to differences in health care etc., of course, but those were all before tax from what I understood.
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 salaries in London for FAANG are equivalent to about 60-70% of those in the US. The stock grants are typically smaller, also, though this is less true for software engineers.
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.
> 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.
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.
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).
I don't have enough details about the exact setup, but the server cost looks excessive* to me. Especially those Xeon Gold and Silver machines (are they using managed hosting or what). Almost all of them are in single OVH data center too, that's not very robust.
* 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.
That is quite normal behavior for most hosters and it depends on the strength of DDOS. If you have to deal with DDOS frequently then you need a loadbalancer in between your service and your clients, that offers DDOS protection.
It's interesting that he spends so little on servers.
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:).
Computers have been so fast for a good + 15yrs. If you don't use bloatware and pile on layers and layers of crap and with good system engineering it's amazing the amount of work you can compute for so little cost.
Excellent article. Serious kudos to the Lichess team on building and operating such a complex piece of software purely on donations.
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?
What do you mean by "accurate"? Compared to chess.com? FIDE? USCF? It really makes no sense comparing ratings between different pools. None of them are more accurate, they are just different.
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.
Sure this is a very nice cause, but if you don't have proper revenue, you can't pay UX designers to make something more people could use. Explains why Lichess is straight up ugly and the interface is just messy.
You making interesting point, with for profit model you can provide better service then with non-profit model to some degree, but it is not always true. There many reasons for such cases, but I think it all comes down to leadership and values of the company, over time leadership and consequently values will change, undoubtedly. Such changes result in higher or lower preference of service to end users versus profits (or innovation, control priorities), I think this is irrespective of for/non-profit organizations.
I don't think it is fair to claim that "Lichess is straight up ugly and the interface is just messy" in such absolute terms. While this might be your opinion, I for one like their design a lot and think it's very clean!! (and prefer it to alternative chess websites)...
Lichess makes fantastic use of the screen space available, works excellently on all manners of devices, has a native darkmode, and puts the most relevant content front-and-center instead of designing around revenue generation first and functionality second.
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.
I think you mean FICS (Free Internet Chess Server)! It started in 1995 I think. I started there too about 2007. It's still going, I visited a few months ago. A bit sleepier than it was. That was the place to follow the moves of live tournaments and discuss the games, before the age of live video broadcasts of tournaments. I loved it so much. Channel 23 was for quacking only etc hehe. Also I mainly played slower games (10 10 or 5 14) and chatted with a lot of the people I played, must have met people from almost every country in the world. I haven't found other sites nearly so friendly.
Yes. I mostly played 2 12. The place felt like IRC for chess, you had to type commands like 'seek 2 12' for a new game and you needed some desktop client like winboard/xboard to play.
Edit: Just played a game, my ID was still active and my last game was in 2012!
hehe nice. Yes, FICS is for life. Oh, you didn't use a client?! Mainly I used BabasChess (Windows), which was awesome, I've still never had such a good chess game seeking and playing experience on any site.
I might have played 2000 games on lichess at this point. Everything from the ease of finding a game, to the smoothness of web and mobile clients, to features centred around analysing and improving your game are nearly flawless. Seeing this post about their commitment to keeping it that way thrills me.
Chess.com is super bloated, slow to load, and hard to navigate. There's so much noise on the screen compared to playing on lichess. Features are paywalled. For example if I want to know how the top players are responding to a certain sequence of moves, I can just see that on lichess. Also weird stuff is locked like using your own computer to analyze games. Also if you haven't been to the site for awhile you get a lovely modal again asking you for money. It's not that getting paid for services is bad, it's just awful when there's a better quality free service.
Yes - not only features are limited and paywalled (fine, you need to keep the lights on), but they're nagging you about buying a subscription at every turn (now this feels intrusive to me).
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.
I use both, but what is chess.com better at is that they have grandmasters there you can learn from. That's the advantage of the commercial model - you can use the money to push things to a higher level. But overall I am on lichess more, since I can play crazyhouse against the computer there. :-)
Case in point, Slate Star Codex advertising used to be quite good. I remember it had these riddles from Jane Street, who where looking for people to hire this way.
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.
Always good to see. (I’m tired of seeing ads everywhere too!) Bravo.
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.
This is a bummer. As much as I love lichess, I think there's a beautiful array of opportunities of monetisation which I believe would be nothing short of wrong incentives. Value-based monetisation (instead of restriction / ad based monetisation) might as well motivate the team to maximise that value for the user.
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.
> 1. Stockfish, server-side game analysis, learning from mistakes
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.
"(chessbase.com, ICC, FICS are lesser alternatives now)"
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.
I meant the *former. Chess.com gives you access to the game record at least (even if its analysis functions are limited for free users). Chess24 doesn't
Chess24 also has I think by far the best output of free chess videos on youtube.[0] My two favourite chess channels are chess24 and chess24 en español. e.g. I'm about to watch the Candidates tournament right now on there, with Judit Polgar commentating and live video. The first few days had Magnus Carlsen (!) commentating.
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.
HN is most US based, that’s one of the richest countries on earth where their citizens suffering from epilepsy wear bracelets to warn others not to call an ambulance.
Taking HN into nationalistic flamewar is exactly the wrong thing to do here and we ban accounts that do it. Please keep this sort of off-topic flamebait off this forum.
the problem though is what happens if he gets sick or needs to move on, or the passion fades? Now you need to hire someone who may not be motivated in the same way, and if compensation is low for the duties entailed, you won't get what you need.
It's not good to undervalue work because you really rely on the gift of the worker to keep the project going.
Would be interesting to see how much money the people here saying Lichess shouldn’t be free or should serve ads, have actually donated to Lichess if they use the site and are so concerned with their sustainability.
Lichess has been live for over a decade, they are a proven success.
475 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 350 ms ] threadWhat is the motivation for it being free.
What is the mechanism for it being free.
In one of the links,
> It amounts to $170 per month. Great news: I have a job (at prismic.io) and I can completely afford that. Lichess is my hobby, and all hobbies cost a bit of money. I can tell you that the joy of building lichess is absolutely worth the price I pay for it!
Maybe it’s because I spend some number of hours a week looking at trees, but it never ceases to amaze me how stupid the average technical person is around the word “forever”. If you don’t have a trust set up to pay the hosting costs in perpetuity, you’re one recession or bad illness away from it being ad-supported. Or Microsoft could make you an offer you can’t refuse like they did with Minecraft.
There are plenty of legal and financial constructs meant to approximate a forever status, and I don’t see any evidence that anyone has tried to achieve any of them.
When are we going to call “making promises you cannot keep” what it really is? Lying.
We can’t be far from having a critical mass of people who realize all the stuff they’ve been eye-rolling at or downvoting is actually true, and then acting like they discovered something new. Half the time I’m just parroting people older than me. More field correspondent than discoverer.
That's true. Good intentions are more compelling, so they draw more people in and convince them more thoroughly, then cause more suffering in the end when everything falls apart.
Lying to yourself doesn’t socially have the same moral hazard as intentionally misleading someone, but the outcomes are often indistinguishable from the perspective of the affected parties.
> If you don’t have a trust set up to pay the hosting costs in perpetuity, you’re one recession or bad illness away from it being ad-supported.
You didn't mention that if the trustees commit a fraud, you are one bad trust away from it being ad-supported. Are you lying? What, you don't have anyway of knowing that it could happen and there are so many other things that can go wrong? Exactly.
But yeah, some big company offering a crapload of money to buy lichess is also a problem. No-one is idealistic enough to refuse an amount of money that can support them and their family for the next two generations.
I’m trying right now to set something up that has the potential to have much more value to someone greedy than it does to my target audience. It’ll take a while I think before it really comes to that, but it is not out of the realm of reason.
I will most definitely be trying to take the temptation away from myself (or my heirs) to sell it. I would likely do that anyway, but the goad is that it costs more than I can really afford to write off unless I get very lucky, or others contribute substantially. There really isn’t much incentive for them to do that while I own everything outright. If I don’t want to end up with a cat food diet in my 80’s I’m probably going to need some of my investment back.
If you truly want to be pedantic, the word "forever" does not appear in the post at all.
Less pedantically, I believe most people have the ability to understand that nothing lasts forever. From reading the post, the emphasis was on "free" and not on the longevity. Also the title of the post could easily be interpreted to mean "Why Lichess will be free for as long as it exists".
> “Why Lichess will be free as long as it exists.”
Same problem. It’s built entirely on wishful thinking. Do you agree with all the choices you made when you were twenty? Do you agree with all of the choices you made after the first time you remember disagreeing with 20 year old you? What makes you think you aren’t going to disagree with half of what you think now?
Current you is going to have to win arguments with future you if you insist on any sort of concept or permanence. Especially since 75 year old you is going to think the concept of permanence is bullshit. If you’re not going to take any steps in that regard, or even plan to make them in the future, then you really don’t understand human nature very well, and probably not yourself either. That alone is worth some hours of quiet contemplation.
> In some contexts they mean the same, but differ syntactically [...] In other contexts there's a difference in that always usually means continuously, at all [relevant] times, whereas forever usually means for an infinite amount of time into the future.
See the link for examples that might further clarify it for you. Obviously stackexchange is not a definitive answer space, but you can verify the differences from the linked post by looking the words up in a detailed dictionary, like the OED.
Of course lofty principles would be cited, like "this is how open source works" or "you should not have used that license if you hadn't wanted this to happen".
And many people here would defend the asshole and forget the original author.
I don’t see any reference to this in the about pages. For this conversation in particular that seems like an important oversight if true. American nonprofits tend to list that stuff prominently. Maybe too prominently, but that’s a whole other kettle of fish.
Your phrasing leaves it a little up in the air as to whether that is what the article is about, which I don’t think it is.
“That is literally what’s written in the article” is quite a different statement from, “That’s literally mentioned in the article.”
Yes, that’s mentioned in the article. Fine.
From what I understood you hijacked the thread into something like "don't be gullible, nothing runs forever, they're lying" which misrepresented the point of the Lichess article which is that they won't charge ever.
Imagine sb reacting to an announcement that healthcare will be free with "Nobody lives for ever, don't be stupid, they're lying"
Hijacking threads towards your personal point of interest is fine I guess and is part of why HN is interesting to me but then it should be clear you are talking about your own thing and you should not artificially place it in the context of the post under discussion (especially if it turns out you have not read it through).
There are more than two states available here. An excellent time to announce always free is when you set up the trust. An excellent time to announce the intention to be free is when asking for advice or help with making that happen.
Edit to add: think about it this way. When a prospective love interest makes an oddly specific promise, does that make you feel more or less safe than you did before? “I’d never cheat on you with your brother.” “I’d never murder you and bury your body in Texas.” Well this was a lovely date, I’ll call you. But I have a busy week and a business trip so it might be a little bit.
I was already assuming lichess intended to remain free. Why are you telling me that now? Was that in jeopardy? Do we need to have a talk?
Everybody says they’re going to do their new favorite thing forever and everybody either gets distracted, gets a new new favorite thing, or worst, gets shit on by life and has to backpedal. Just... Roll that good energy into literally anything else. Please.
[citation needed] for Microsoft blackmailing Minecraft owner(s).
See https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/AnOfferYouCantRe... (tvtropes of all things)
What are some examples of such legal and financial constructs ?
You can set up a non-profit, making it easier to accept money and adding friction to commercial entities trying to buy you out. Of course then have to chase operating expenses forever. You do well enough, you can set up a trust or endowments to operate in part off of investment profits, and now you don’t have to worry about one big donor trying to name everything after himself or twisting the mandate to their worldview.
Humans can screw anything up given enough time, but if your idea is good enough for copycats, then if your successors fail to keep the spirit of your goals alive, one of the imitators most likely will.
It’s also a great example of something born of and sustained by a community: a testament to the chess demography.
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...
2: https://forums.online-go.com/t/ads-ogs-and-you/14090
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.
[0]https://www.gwern.net/Ads
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.
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.
Lichess is responsible for most of my chess progress through matches, puzzles, analysis board. Excellent piece of software.
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?
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.
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.
Edit: Just played a game, my ID was still active and my last game was in 2012!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Lichess has been live for over a decade, they are a proven success.