4 ms·

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 Thi

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.

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.