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Paying off Chess streamers is pretty much the only way Chess.com can keep people using their site. Their product is simply inferior in every way, except for the

Paying off Chess streamers is pretty much the only way Chess.com can keep people using their site. Their product is simply inferior in every way, except for their library of master lessons, and all these GMs exclusively streaming through Chess.com. I figure all this spending on sponsorship and GM content is why the rest of their site is so inferior to Lichess. Lichess can spend all their time perfecting the platform, and it really shows.

dalbasal 4y ago
There are more reasons, but... At core there is a dichotomy between Chess.com's business-model-ish approach and Lichess' communist approach... to put it in Thibault's own words. No freemium tiers. No subscription plans, ads, etc. Just donations. That approach has been good for keeping the UX lightweight and snapy. Chess.com has been around longer, so Lichess' is still catching up with features. I quite enjoy having them both compete as they are.
- kzrdude 4y ago
  I considered getting a chess.com subscription because their puzzles are a lot better than lichess'. However, the default tier/starting tier of subscription only gives access to a pittance of "puzzles per day" which is ridiculous.
  - mtlmtlmtlmtl 4y ago
    Yeah it's always been pretty clear to me that the intermediate plans exist mainly to annoy people into buying the most expensive ones. You know, in for a penny...
  - ginnungagap 4y ago
    There's also chesstempo for puzzles if you are not aware of it already, the puzzles are great and free, with subscription tiers for more features (unlimited endgame puzzles, custom puzzle sets, opening trainer etc.). The UI is ugly, clunky and old, but as long as it is only for puzzles and not playing I can stand it
    - codeflo 4y ago
      I’m getting increasingly frustrated by the puzzle quality. Puzzle difficulty is determined algorithmically using an Elo system (where essentially puzzles play against players). That sounds great in theory. The problem is that there’s no penalty for guessing, in fact, the UI forces you to make a guess. This means the rating partly measures guessability instead of solvability. At my low-ish rating, I get a mixture of puzzles I can realistically solve, and extremely hard puzzles where the obvious dumb guess happens to also be the correct solution. I’m not sure if anybody else is annoyed by that as much as I am.
      - loansindi 4y ago
        The biggest benefit, in my opinion, of doing puzzles is building pattern recognition. If that obvious dumb guess is consistent for the structure presented in the difficult-but-guessable puzzle, then I think there's still value to doing it.
        lupire 4y ago
        It's not; that's the point. Level 1000 puzzle: obvious pattern move is correct, no surprise. Level 1400: obvious pattern move is correct, but you have to check a potential threat unless you are guessing. Level 1800: obvious pattern move is incorrect, need to notice the threat and findnthr better move.
- mtlmtlmtlmtl 4y ago
  Well, chess.com spend quite a bit of dev time on gimmicks like their custom 4-player chess variant, that was followed by a torrent of 4 player chess content from their army of chess streamers. To convince someone to buy chess.com, they need to make themself look like the de facto standard site. They also need to invent new features because charging people just to play chess and solve puzzles online is sort of ridiculous when that's been available to people since the damn 90s.
- bluecalm 4y ago
  I don't think commercial vs communist has anything to do with it. Thibault is just a very good, hard working programmer. If his political views were different then Lichess would still have the best platform and he would have way more money. There is no reason what so over for chess com playing area being as bad as it is other than them not being able to find a programmer as good as Thibault. It's not only about money, such people are just very rare.
  - dalbasal 4y ago
    I would agree with you in a lot of cases, especially public administration but... In Thibault's case, he has consciously and deliberately made it so that his political views do affect choices at all levels. A lot of it is quite direct. If you are "communist^," then you think differently about login, data retention. You make feature decisions differently. You also make hiring/expansion/strategy decisions differently. Chess.com needs to worry about free-paid conversion rates, crippling features to differentiate subscription plans, analytics people/code to tie it all together. Those require code, infrastructure. They come with performance costs, technical debt. Thibault has explicitly identified these, and deliberately carved advantages out of them. What can you do with much less bloat. Even just having more money has disadvantages, besides the obvious advantages. You now have teams and senior people responsible for analytics, commercial performance, an extensive (and restrictive) streamer sponsorship program. You have a bigger accounts dept. etc. Modern companies have a lot of bloat, and administrative analogues to technical debt. That stuff inevitably leads to a difference in product, even if you had the exact same programers. Environments matter. Thibault is trying to win. I like it. ^I'm going to call this ideology "Thibault Communism" to keep it narrow.
    - bluecalm 4y ago
      But it's not about all the choices, logins, subscriptions or anything like that. It's about the game play alone. It's smooth and fast while you play. The servers don't lag, don't crash, the UI is very responsive, you don't feel like overall slowness and lag of all of it robs you of time or experience. You can debate all other surrounding stuff being influenced by the author's politics but this one is purely about him being able to implement it and the commercials competitors failing spectacularly. It's not unique to Lichess btw, back in the day ICC had smooth, responsive gameplay as well. It was commercial and it was great.
deleted 4y ago
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bitcharmer 4y ago
> Their product is simply inferior in every way, except for their library of master lessons That's just not true. I've been using both for a long time and chess.com has more intuitive UI. I frequently find myself exporting my games from lichess into chess.com simply because the latter offers superior game analysis experience.
- ginnungagap 4y ago
  > simply because the latter offers superior game analysis experience. But it does so once per day, unless you pay (the low depth analysis you get for free on chess.com is not great to put it mildly)
- jstx1 4y ago
  > chess.com has more intuitive UI This is just mindblowing to me. It's not just that I disagree but I think the opposite is true, and by a very large margin too. I guess people just have different preferences when it comes to UI but especially for fast time controls, I don't get how people put up with chess.com, it's outright unusable for me.
  - shric 4y ago
    Strongly agree with you. Both the chess playing UI and exploring the rest of the site -- lichess is vastly superior. Prominent example when you click "Play" you go to https://www.chess.com/play https://www.chess.com/play and get presented with a chess board. At this point, it actually lets you make an initial move. But you're not playing anyone! You then need to click, for example, "Play online". The rest of the site is disorganised. For example there's stuff under "Learn" and "Resources" and I can never remember where to find things.
  - sib301 4y ago
    I think you're right that it's mostly subjective. I slightly prefer chess.com, to lichess, but I wouldn't call either "outright unusable".
- the_mitsuhiko 4y ago
  I would love to know what makes chess.com UI more intuitive in your eyes. They seem quite similar.
mythz 4y ago
> Their product is simply inferior in every way Completely untrue, I've played on both and the UX + post game Analysis, video content library, etc is far better on chess.com. I do hope lichess.org is able to improve and find better monetization options that's able to pay for more dev + UX resources, championship prizes + GM commentators which makes watching chess far more entertaining.
- permo-w 4y ago
  the lichess post game analysis is as good as that of chess.com, but isn’t presented in quite such a shiny appealing way. it’s not hard to find, but you have to seek it out, whereas chess.com shoves it in your face and tries to get you to pay for more
  - jstx1 4y ago
    > but you have to seek it out, I don't think there's any seeking out necessary - you have 3 things to click on after a game - rematch, new opponent and analysis. Like is there really a user demographic that (1) is interested in game analysis and (2) doesn't notice or understand the button that's shown as an option at the end of every game?
    - mtlmtlmtlmtl 4y ago
      I think their point was that Chess.com drops you into analysis mode automatically when a game ends, whereas on lichess you have to go to analysis mode.
      - jstx1 4y ago
        Being auto-moved to a place I didn't select seems like a worse user experience to me. But I'm sure it helps chess.com's conversion rate to paid users or whatever.
    - apetresc 4y ago
      To be fair, I'm pretty sure by "analysis" they mean "engine analysis" (since that's the part you have to pay for on chess.com, not just getting an analysis board of your PGN). On lichess, "Analysis" is one button, but "Request Computer Analysis" is another button _in_ the analysis screen, and its often below the fold and behind a tab on most display resolutions. Probably because even fishnet wouldn't be able to keep up with deeply analysing every game on the site, and the in-browser WASM stockfish is good enough for most blitz/bullet games.
IAmNotAFix 4y ago
As someone who started playing without having any idea about the platform landscape, and therefore chose the first Google result, which seemed to have a legit UI and domain name, and then met people who also happen to be on this platform, I would guess that their main strengths are: SEO, UI, brand, and the network effect.
- BbzzbB 4y ago
  How much does network effect really matter past a certain point for low-to-mid ELO chess players? Whether there are 100 or 10k players in my ELO range at any given time, I'm unlikely to even notice it. IMO you just have to get past a certain threshold (which both Lichens and Chesscom have long passed); granted it is probably higher the better of a player you are as your opponent pool thins out.
  - naet 4y ago
    In my anecdotal experience, lichess has a smaller playerbase and it's most noticeable in the middle elo where certain lines or trends end up very popular in the lichess community and get overplayed. Whereas on chess.com I am more likely to see a bigger variety of openings. I had written off chess.com in favor of lichess but now that I play both I actually enjoy the chess.com user base as a differentiator between the two.
chucksmash 4y ago
chess.com satisifices. Have had several times where I thought "Even I could make a better platform than this" (for instance: their PGNs always used to show today's date in the game metadata instead of the date the game was played and it took four emails over a week to make support understand why this was wrong). When I open the app and look for a 10/0 match though, I always find one right away, and this + cursory game reviews covers ~100% of my use case, so shrug.
as_bntd 4y ago
> Their product is simply inferior in every way I disagree and I play almost exclusively on Lichess. In chess.com you can: 1. set up multiple pre-moves and 2. play several variants that aren't in lichess, including 4-player chess (this is mostly the reason I sometimes use chess.com).
- retzkek 4y ago
  3. Daily (correspondence) tournaments and a larger correspondence community. That's mostly what I play, since it allows me to play whenever and for as long as I want. 10-20 simultaneous games means there's always something for me to play. I can blitz out moves for all games in 15 minutes, or spend an hour thinking about one game. I prefer lichess, but just can't have that experience so I pay for chess.com.
- TimothyBJacobs 4y ago
  You can setup multiple pre-moves, but each one takes a minimum of 0.1 seconds. Lichess doesn't have this minimum time requirement, so it doesn't let you setup multiple pre-moves. I much prefer Lichess' system for Bullet.
naet 4y ago
Chess.com has plenty of value, it just isn't as free or open as lichess. Cheds.com supports more game modes / variations (bughouse and puzzle rush are two favorites!), better social features, built in lessons and lectures you can buy or subscribe to, the client is snappy and lets you set up a sequence of premoves instead of just one, etc. Lichess also has some killer features of it's own: everything is free, including tournaments, the titled arenas are nice, the analysis tools are free and easy to use, etc. There doesn't have to be just one platform. A paid and open source platform can both offer different value propositions even if there's some overlap.

dalbasal 4y ago

There are more reasons, but... At core there is a dichotomy between Chess.com's business-model-ish approach and Lichess' communist approach... to put it in Thibault's own words. No freemium tiers. No subscription plans, ads, etc. Just donations. That approach has been good for keeping the UX lightweight and snapy. Chess.com has been around longer, so Lichess' is still catching up with features. I quite enjoy having them both compete as they are.

kzrdude 4y ago
I considered getting a chess.com subscription because their puzzles are a lot better than lichess'. However, the default tier/starting tier of subscription only gives access to a pittance of "puzzles per day" which is ridiculous.
- mtlmtlmtlmtl 4y ago
  Yeah it's always been pretty clear to me that the intermediate plans exist mainly to annoy people into buying the most expensive ones. You know, in for a penny...
- ginnungagap 4y ago
  There's also chesstempo for puzzles if you are not aware of it already, the puzzles are great and free, with subscription tiers for more features (unlimited endgame puzzles, custom puzzle sets, opening trainer etc.). The UI is ugly, clunky and old, but as long as it is only for puzzles and not playing I can stand it
  - codeflo 4y ago
    I’m getting increasingly frustrated by the puzzle quality. Puzzle difficulty is determined algorithmically using an Elo system (where essentially puzzles play against players). That sounds great in theory. The problem is that there’s no penalty for guessing, in fact, the UI forces you to make a guess. This means the rating partly measures guessability instead of solvability. At my low-ish rating, I get a mixture of puzzles I can realistically solve, and extremely hard puzzles where the obvious dumb guess happens to also be the correct solution. I’m not sure if anybody else is annoyed by that as much as I am.
    - loansindi 4y ago
      The biggest benefit, in my opinion, of doing puzzles is building pattern recognition. If that obvious dumb guess is consistent for the structure presented in the difficult-but-guessable puzzle, then I think there's still value to doing it.
      - lupire 4y ago
        It's not; that's the point. Level 1000 puzzle: obvious pattern move is correct, no surprise. Level 1400: obvious pattern move is correct, but you have to check a potential threat unless you are guessing. Level 1800: obvious pattern move is incorrect, need to notice the threat and findnthr better move.
mtlmtlmtlmtl 4y ago
Well, chess.com spend quite a bit of dev time on gimmicks like their custom 4-player chess variant, that was followed by a torrent of 4 player chess content from their army of chess streamers. To convince someone to buy chess.com, they need to make themself look like the de facto standard site. They also need to invent new features because charging people just to play chess and solve puzzles online is sort of ridiculous when that's been available to people since the damn 90s.
bluecalm 4y ago
I don't think commercial vs communist has anything to do with it. Thibault is just a very good, hard working programmer. If his political views were different then Lichess would still have the best platform and he would have way more money. There is no reason what so over for chess com playing area being as bad as it is other than them not being able to find a programmer as good as Thibault. It's not only about money, such people are just very rare.
- dalbasal 4y ago
  I would agree with you in a lot of cases, especially public administration but... In Thibault's case, he has consciously and deliberately made it so that his political views do affect choices at all levels. A lot of it is quite direct. If you are "communist^," then you think differently about login, data retention. You make feature decisions differently. You also make hiring/expansion/strategy decisions differently. Chess.com needs to worry about free-paid conversion rates, crippling features to differentiate subscription plans, analytics people/code to tie it all together. Those require code, infrastructure. They come with performance costs, technical debt. Thibault has explicitly identified these, and deliberately carved advantages out of them. What can you do with much less bloat. Even just having more money has disadvantages, besides the obvious advantages. You now have teams and senior people responsible for analytics, commercial performance, an extensive (and restrictive) streamer sponsorship program. You have a bigger accounts dept. etc. Modern companies have a lot of bloat, and administrative analogues to technical debt. That stuff inevitably leads to a difference in product, even if you had the exact same programers. Environments matter. Thibault is trying to win. I like it. ^I'm going to call this ideology "Thibault Communism" to keep it narrow.
  - bluecalm 4y ago
    But it's not about all the choices, logins, subscriptions or anything like that. It's about the game play alone. It's smooth and fast while you play. The servers don't lag, don't crash, the UI is very responsive, you don't feel like overall slowness and lag of all of it robs you of time or experience. You can debate all other surrounding stuff being influenced by the author's politics but this one is purely about him being able to implement it and the commercials competitors failing spectacularly. It's not unique to Lichess btw, back in the day ICC had smooth, responsive gameplay as well. It was commercial and it was great.

deleted 4y ago

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bitcharmer 4y ago

> Their product is simply inferior in every way, except for their library of master lessons That's just not true. I've been using both for a long time and chess.com has more intuitive UI. I frequently find myself exporting my games from lichess into chess.com simply because the latter offers superior game analysis experience.

ginnungagap 4y ago
> simply because the latter offers superior game analysis experience. But it does so once per day, unless you pay (the low depth analysis you get for free on chess.com is not great to put it mildly)
jstx1 4y ago
> chess.com has more intuitive UI This is just mindblowing to me. It's not just that I disagree but I think the opposite is true, and by a very large margin too. I guess people just have different preferences when it comes to UI but especially for fast time controls, I don't get how people put up with chess.com, it's outright unusable for me.
- shric 4y ago
  Strongly agree with you. Both the chess playing UI and exploring the rest of the site -- lichess is vastly superior. Prominent example when you click "Play" you go to https://www.chess.com/play https://www.chess.com/play and get presented with a chess board. At this point, it actually lets you make an initial move. But you're not playing anyone! You then need to click, for example, "Play online". The rest of the site is disorganised. For example there's stuff under "Learn" and "Resources" and I can never remember where to find things.
- sib301 4y ago
  I think you're right that it's mostly subjective. I slightly prefer chess.com, to lichess, but I wouldn't call either "outright unusable".
the_mitsuhiko 4y ago
I would love to know what makes chess.com UI more intuitive in your eyes. They seem quite similar.

mythz 4y ago

> Their product is simply inferior in every way Completely untrue, I've played on both and the UX + post game Analysis, video content library, etc is far better on chess.com. I do hope lichess.org is able to improve and find better monetization options that's able to pay for more dev + UX resources, championship prizes + GM commentators which makes watching chess far more entertaining.

permo-w 4y ago
the lichess post game analysis is as good as that of chess.com, but isn’t presented in quite such a shiny appealing way. it’s not hard to find, but you have to seek it out, whereas chess.com shoves it in your face and tries to get you to pay for more
- jstx1 4y ago
  > but you have to seek it out, I don't think there's any seeking out necessary - you have 3 things to click on after a game - rematch, new opponent and analysis. Like is there really a user demographic that (1) is interested in game analysis and (2) doesn't notice or understand the button that's shown as an option at the end of every game?
  - mtlmtlmtlmtl 4y ago
    I think their point was that Chess.com drops you into analysis mode automatically when a game ends, whereas on lichess you have to go to analysis mode.
    - jstx1 4y ago
      Being auto-moved to a place I didn't select seems like a worse user experience to me. But I'm sure it helps chess.com's conversion rate to paid users or whatever.
  - apetresc 4y ago
    To be fair, I'm pretty sure by "analysis" they mean "engine analysis" (since that's the part you have to pay for on chess.com, not just getting an analysis board of your PGN). On lichess, "Analysis" is one button, but "Request Computer Analysis" is another button _in_ the analysis screen, and its often below the fold and behind a tab on most display resolutions. Probably because even fishnet wouldn't be able to keep up with deeply analysing every game on the site, and the in-browser WASM stockfish is good enough for most blitz/bullet games.

IAmNotAFix 4y ago

As someone who started playing without having any idea about the platform landscape, and therefore chose the first Google result, which seemed to have a legit UI and domain name, and then met people who also happen to be on this platform, I would guess that their main strengths are: SEO, UI, brand, and the network effect.

BbzzbB 4y ago
How much does network effect really matter past a certain point for low-to-mid ELO chess players? Whether there are 100 or 10k players in my ELO range at any given time, I'm unlikely to even notice it. IMO you just have to get past a certain threshold (which both Lichens and Chesscom have long passed); granted it is probably higher the better of a player you are as your opponent pool thins out.
- naet 4y ago
  In my anecdotal experience, lichess has a smaller playerbase and it's most noticeable in the middle elo where certain lines or trends end up very popular in the lichess community and get overplayed. Whereas on chess.com I am more likely to see a bigger variety of openings. I had written off chess.com in favor of lichess but now that I play both I actually enjoy the chess.com user base as a differentiator between the two.

chucksmash 4y ago

chess.com satisifices. Have had several times where I thought "Even I could make a better platform than this" (for instance: their PGNs always used to show today's date in the game metadata instead of the date the game was played and it took four emails over a week to make support understand why this was wrong). When I open the app and look for a 10/0 match though, I always find one right away, and this + cursory game reviews covers ~100% of my use case, so shrug.

as_bntd 4y ago

> Their product is simply inferior in every way I disagree and I play almost exclusively on Lichess. In chess.com you can: 1. set up multiple pre-moves and 2. play several variants that aren't in lichess, including 4-player chess (this is mostly the reason I sometimes use chess.com).

retzkek 4y ago
3. Daily (correspondence) tournaments and a larger correspondence community. That's mostly what I play, since it allows me to play whenever and for as long as I want. 10-20 simultaneous games means there's always something for me to play. I can blitz out moves for all games in 15 minutes, or spend an hour thinking about one game. I prefer lichess, but just can't have that experience so I pay for chess.com.
TimothyBJacobs 4y ago
You can setup multiple pre-moves, but each one takes a minimum of 0.1 seconds. Lichess doesn't have this minimum time requirement, so it doesn't let you setup multiple pre-moves. I much prefer Lichess' system for Bullet.

naet 4y ago

Chess.com has plenty of value, it just isn't as free or open as lichess. Cheds.com supports more game modes / variations (bughouse and puzzle rush are two favorites!), better social features, built in lessons and lectures you can buy or subscribe to, the client is snappy and lets you set up a sequence of premoves instead of just one, etc. Lichess also has some killer features of it's own: everything is free, including tournaments, the titled arenas are nice, the analysis tools are free and easy to use, etc. There doesn't have to be just one platform. A paid and open source platform can both offer different value propositions even if there's some overlap.